


Do Droids Dream of Electric Sheep?

by nookienostradamus



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Anal Sex, Blade Runner AU, Kylux - Freeform, M/M, Messy Angst Blowjob, Mild Gore, Oral Sex, POV Multiple, Slow Burn, TFA canon character death, Violence, nobody else dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-05-16 07:52:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 42,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5820295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nookienostradamus/pseuds/nookienostradamus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren is a burned-out mercenary - a Blade Runner hired to kill synthetic human beings known as replicants. Three replicants - Finn, Poe, and Rey - have made a desperate bid to get to Earth, where their kind have been declared illegal, in order to find their maker, Eldon Snoke. While chasing the three rogue replicants and their droid, Ren also meets an enigmatic man who is not necessarily what he seems, and may even be a piece in the dangerous game they all are playing.</p><p>Blade Runner (1982) AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sigma 1-M (Finn)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vampireinvitations](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vampireinvitations/gifts).



> This fic is dedicated to the insanely talented and insanely supportive [vampireinvitations](http://archiveofourown.org/users/vampireinvitations/pseuds/vampireinvitations). Thank you, man.

It wasn’t like he woke up one day and just decided he couldn’t do it anymore. The FN model wasn’t actually supposed to _decide_ anything. His job was to follow orders. 

As was all of theirs. Which is why he was starting to wonder whether there was a point to the huge deployment of Snoke Corporation Heavy Guard to offworld mining colony Sigma 1-M. All of the miners themselves were replicants. The planet had just gotten a fresh shipment with fresh incept dates. Only the overseers were human, unengineered. What was he going to do? Come down on a superior for getting handsy with one of the pleasure models in the foremen’s lounge?

He didn’t think so. Of course, he wasn’t supposed to _think_ , either. This is your job. This is what you were created for. Take it and be grateful.

And, oddly enough, at times Finn was grateful. From under the thin dome of the artificial atmosphere, the smudges of galaxies appeared to dance and waver in pastel colors. The nearby stars (“nearby,” of course, being relative) sported sharply defined haloes. A billion bullseyes; cargo and crew ships their eventual darts.

Finn shifted his feet. They were sore. He wasn’t, after all, a robot. 

Below his perch on the ridge, the expanse of the open pit yawned, boiling with activity. Gray-suited miners, most of them PO or RE models, humped sacks of ore to carting droids, whose propulsion units filled the air with a sort of shushing. If he had ever heard them, Finn might have compared the noise to that of cicadas. 

Finn had spent all of his three years on Sigma 1-M with a pulse rifle slung over his shoulder and an itch at the back of his genetically specialized brainstem that he couldn’t explain. 

Until he could. Or, rather, until he had reason to listen to it. 

Model years never expired in view of the population at large. Three years and three-hundred-sixty-four days to the hour of their incept date, the expiring wave of models was shuffled off to a transport cruiser. Presumably they shut down on board. In the barracks, some of Finn’s FN compatriots speculated without fear or irony that they were jettisoned out of orbit like so much mine tailing.

_Fear. Was that what that was?_

He had just taken a sip from his canteen full of thick NutriComplet when he saw the first PO model shudder and slump, dragged down a short expanse of canted ground by his bulging ore pack.

Finn tilted his head.

Then the great wave passed over the pit below. PO model after PO model performed a sort of herky-jerky dance that skittered down from neck to ankle before falling in a heap over befuddled carting droids, over the wheels of haulers, over one another.

The human overseers were shouting now. Finn’s first instinct was to laugh, which was not something he did often. What would have been a frenzied, barking, high-pitched thing was caught in his throat when a claw-tired hauler veered into a group of RE model miners, catching them below its tread blades.

In all of his two-and-a-half years he had never heard anyone scream.

The other FN models were rushing into the pit, some of them slipping despite the terracing and their cruel boot cleats. Finn was frozen, hand on the stock of his pulse rifle, watching. 

A PO model struggled up out of the third level. One of the expired ones had fallen across his legs. He reached up toward an FN, who passed him by. Finn at last shook himself out of his stupor and went down, kicking the expired replicant off of his exact living, breathing double. 

Burying the spikes of his cleats as well as he could, Finn crouched and extended his hand toward the PO. His palm was calloused, far more so than Finn’s own hands. He hauled up on the PO’s arm, at one point leaving him legs-dangling over the washout trench. 

When they had both had feet on terra firma ( _Sigma 1-M firma_?), the PO model exhaled and nodded his head a couple of times, blinking. 

“Thank you,” he said.

Finn didn’t know what to say because no one had ever thanked him before. “Yes,” he said.

The PO looked out over what had become a hellscape of running officers, falling guards, screaming miners and whining droids being torn apart by their own equipment. “I’ve never seen it,” he told Finn.

Finn shook his head. “No.”

“They don’t want you to see it.”

“They?”

“The foremen. They pack us away before expiration. No muss, no fuss.”

Finn didn’t necessarily understand the expression, but he got the gist. “What happened to them?”

“Looks like someone miscalculated.” The PO model’s wide eyes shone, watery in the arc lights overhanging the pit.

Finn furrowed his brow. 

“What do you call yourself? And don’t give me your number,” the PO said.

“Uh...Finn.”

“Finn. I’m Poe.”

They grasped hands once again, Finn marveling at how rough Poe’s were. “Let’s get you out of here,” Finn told him. He helped Poe up the terraced steps, aghast that the man didn’t have spikes on his boots. 

As if reading his thoughts, Poe said, “I drive a hauler.”

At the lip of the pit they stopped to catch their breath. 

“Should we go back down?” Finn asked. Poe’s laugh almost made him flinch.

“Have you ever watched yourself die, Finn?”

Finn kept silent, trying not to let his gaze slip below his feet.

“I was looking into eyes that looked exactly like mine when the life just...drained right out of them. Like the barracks at lights-out.”

“Why didn’t you expire?”

“Incept date 2090-14-3.” Poe looked out beyond the pit to the horizon, where the Hand Nebula quivered in green and gold. “There are a few of us out there.”

Another broken measure of screams wobbled up from the pit’s far wall. “Not enough,” Finn said.

“More than one is twice enough,” Poe said, still looking beyond the bulb of the atmosphere. “Listen,” he said, turning back toward Finn. “Thanks for helping me. You can go back down if you want, but I’m leaving.”

“To go where?” Finn asked.

“Rey needs my help.” He fumbled at his side, patting then swearing. “I lost my canteen.”

Finn shrugged his from his shoulder and offered it up.

“Are you hungry?” Poe asked.

“No.”

“If you don’t need your NutriComplet, I know someone who does.”

***

A lone guard shack, squat and dust-covered, sat atop the rim of Far Ridge. Finn had retracted his cleats for the trek across the flatlands, but he could redeploy. He certainly wasn’t going to carry the soft-shoed Poe up the entire cliff face.

It turned out, however, that they didn’t need to. Past the concealing obelisk of a slate boulder at the foot of the ridge, Poe led the way into the mouth of a snaking cavern. Finn had to feel his way through a couple of rocky switchbacks before a dot of buttery light appeared before them. 

The walls thrummed, a low growl through the rock.

“Poe?”

“Up here.”

Poe was smiling when Finn reached him at the entrance to an ovoid chamber. The ceiling was strung with lights hung on nails hammered into the rock. The source of the rumble was a small generator. It coughed, then rattled. A pale hand holding a wrench shot out from underneath a pile of blankets and clobbered the generator’s steel outer shell. Chastised, the machine went back to its low hum. 

Something in the corner beeped and burbled.

“Poe?” The voice was female. A scruffy-haired RE model sat up, the rough blankets sliding off her face and shoulders. 

“It’s me, Rey.”

The one he called Rey smiled. “I’m hungry.”

“I brought food and company.”

Finn stepped forward into the light and shook his canteen. He wasn’t entirely sure why being in Rey’s presence made him feel shy, sheepish even. 

“This is Finn,” Poe said.

“FN,” she said. “Finn.”

“RE,” he answered. “Rey. Why are you here?”

Rey stood up, shaking a scurf of dust off of her old, patchy miner’s uniform. “Food first.” She held her hand out and smiled. She smiled a lot. 

Finn passed over the canteen. After the massacre at the mining pit, he wasn’t sure he would ever eat again. 

“Finn might have saved my life,” Poe said.

“What happened?” Rey asked between sips.

“A bunch of PO models expired in the pit,” Poe said.

Her eyes went wide. “Right in the pit?”

“All I can guess is a paperwork error,” said Poe, brushing a hand over his face.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Rey told him. Then she looked at Finn.

“I’m still here,” Poe said, but there was a brittle edge to the words.

From against the wall, something beeped again and Finn looked over, shocked to see a small, orb-shaped droid. If he’d ever seen a soccer ball, he might say it looked like one. Or a fried egg, the yolk shivering and moving as it rolled into full illumination.

Rey had a little NutriComplet at the corners of her mouth, which she wiped away with the back of her hand. “BB8, this is Finn.”

The little ball burbled at him.

“Is that a dispatches droid?” Finn asked.

“Sure is,” Poe said. “A glitch sent it to Far Ridge instead of Near Ridge. That’s where Rey found him.”

Rey tossed the empty canteen back to Finn, who fumbled it a couple of times before it landed solidly in his grip. 

“What are you doing at Far Ridge?”

Rey gestured at the mess around her. The blankets, empty canteens, even a small human-like figure made of cloth and twine settled on a rock ledge just above where BB8 had emerged. “I live here.”

“How?” Finn asked.

She grinned. “Ducked out with a contingent of expiring units. I had plans to go to Earth, but the freighter had to make an emergency landing on Far Ridge. I snuck out.”

“Earth,” Finn said. “Why?”

Rey looked at Poe. “Don’t you sometimes remember that this isn’t all there is?”

“We’re not allowed there. They’d hunt us down.”

“Well,” Rey said, “now it’s important.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m going to die soon,” she said, utterly matter-of-fact. She didn’t say _expire_. “Incept date 2089-2-2.”

Finn stepped forward. “You’ll definitely die on Earth. They have special people. They hunt down replicants.”

“I’d rather die there than here.”

Poe, standing to the side, nodded. “We found something out. Information from the dispatches droid.”

“Like it was meant just for us,” Rey said, rapt, meeting Poe’s gaze.

“What is it?”

Both Rey and Poe smiled. 

“BB8, why don’t you show him the file?” Rey said.

The droid sprang to life again, its eye-like infrared window pointed at Finn. A hatch in its side opened and a hologram spun into being between them. It was composed of endless helical swirls, twisting around one another in a luminescent orb.

“DNA,” Finn said.

“Our DNA,” said Poe. “At least, we think so.”

“But look,” Rey said, pointing to a portion of the swirling mass that glowed pink rather than blue. 

Finn hadn’t even noticed it.

“BB8, enhance fifty-four to forty-six,” said Rey.

The pink portion blew up, filling the space of the holographic orb entirely.

“Can you read the tag on the helix?” Rey prompted.

Leaning in, Finn squinted, following the lazy rotation. “Something...matrix. Expiration Matrix.” He looked up at Rey and Poe, their faces lit by more than just the glow of the hologram. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, we think the glitch fried some of the data,” Rey said. “But if this is our DNA, we’re meant to notice that this part is different.”

“The expiration matrix,” Finn said. “They changed it?”

“We think so,” said Poe.

“Which means they could possibly reverse engineer us to live longer,” Rey said. “Maybe not to expire at all.”

“Who are ‘they?’ Snoke Corporation?”

Both Poe and Rey nodded. 

“So you’re planning to go to Earth to see if the Corporation will give you more life.”

“Not just the company,” Poe said. “We need to talk to Snoke himself.”

“So what do you think?” asked Rey. Her eyes were shining.

The pinkish glow reminded Finn of the sheen of blood on the bladed treads of the haulers. Despite himself, he shuddered. “It’s a long shot.”

“It’s the only chance Rey has.”

“You could go back. They’re probably still cleaning up the mess,” Rey said, a teasing note in her voice. “One single FN model from the Heavy Guard won’t be missed right away.”

“I have a feeling roll call is going to be late tonight,” Poe said.

“We can’t get to Earth tonight,” Finn said.

“We can jump the freighter full of the expired,” Poe said. “Me, Rey, BB8...and you. Or you can go back.”

Finn ran his fingers along the nylon strap of his pulse rifle. “No.”

“No?”

“No going back. I’m coming with you.”

BB8 trilled. Rey and Poe looked at one another, smiling.


	2. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

Rain. Ceaseless rain from a scarred sky.

It was nothing new.

Kylo Ren stood below the eaves of a secondhand vidscreen shop, leaning on the display window, waiting for Chao to signal that his order was ready. Dirty water still rattled off the gutters and spattered his shoes, the upturned collar of his black trench coat. 

He scowled and brushed rain off the holosheet he held. _Catastrophic machine failure at off-world mining colony._ He shook his head and looked over at the the nearest trash can. It was overflowing already, plasteel bottles and jet injectors tumbling out over the filthy sidewalk. 

“Fuck,” he said, loud enough for one of the blue-robed monks of the Benevolent Way to hear him and frown. 

“Nineteen!” Chao called.

_Finally._

Holding the sheet over his head as a shield from the rain, Ren jogged across the street to the Number One Noodle Spot. It was no empty claim. Chao’s food, like his name, was excellent.

“Luosifen,” Chao said. “With snails.”

“And pork,” Ren said, settling himself on a stool below Chao’s red awning.

“With snails,” Chao said again, a bit of the thick broth slopping over the edge of the bowl as he set it down.

Ren hammered his fist against the counter, causing both the other diners and their various plates and bowls to jump.

Chao arched an eyebrow and removed a piece of fatty pork from his stew pot with a pair of chopsticks. He dropped it into Ren’s bowl. “And pig.”

Ren grimaced. “Fine.”

He wasted no time and stood on no ceremony while shoveling the noodles and wobbling snail meat into his mouth. Slowly, the other customers resumed their meals, their hesitant discussions. 

Mid-bite, Ren felt a warm presence at his back, breath ruffling his hair. He could practically smell Phasma before she spoke. Metal and smoke and wet cloth. Not that the entire city of Los Angeles didn’t smell of wet things.

“You’re coming with me, Ren,” she said, voice low and dangerous. Phasma spoke in the part-English, part-Mandarin, part-Spanish patois of the street. 

To piss her off, Ren nodded at Chao, expecting a translation even though he knew perfectly well what she’d said.

Chao rolled his eyes. “She said you have to come with her.”

Perhaps to return the favor with a jab, Phasma continued in the dialect.

“What’d she say?” Ren asked Chao.

“Says you’re a blade runner.”

“Tell her I’m eating.”

“Now,” Phasma said. “Mitaka wants to see you.”

Gritting his teeth, Ren spun on his seat and looked up at his former partner. And he had to look up quite a bit. Ren was a tall man but Phasma towered, her head almost reaching the fringe of the awning. Rain dripped off of the edge of her soaked leather fedora. 

In the street patois, Ren smirked and said, “I’m taking my fucking noodles.”

***

The air inside the hoverpatrol unit, smelling richly of snail broth, billowed out when Ren opened the door. He leapt off the running board just before the car touched down on the station’s multi-petaled landing pad. The car listed to its heavier side, cracking its thruster against the concrete.

Ren knew Phasma wouldn’t swear at him, but she was boiling mad nonetheless. Should’ve spilled some of the soup inside the car on top of it all, he thought. He crushed the empty cellose bowl in one hand and tossed it over the edge of the building, not bothering to watch it fall and join the rest of the garbage—human and otherwise—below.

Phasma led the way into the building, taking care to flick the brim of her wet hat backward so fat droplets of water landed on Ren’s face. He suppressed the urge to strangle her with her necktie.

Their footsteps rang along the hallways, Ren re-tracing the familiar route to Mitaka’s office. The bustle of the main floor was subdued somewhat as he and Phasma walked through rows of desks with their holoscreens and vidphones, detectives leaning back in their chairs to watch the two go by. 

Mitaka wore a huge, patently false smile as Ren walked in. “Shut the door,” he said. He hammered the button on his desk that autofilmed the windows, and green-shaded bankers’ lamps flickered on inside the room to compensate for the sudden darkness. 

Like the asshole he was, Mitaka turned one of the shades so the LED bulb shone directly in Ren’s face. “Knew it’d be a chore to drag you in here.”

“So you sent your dog?”

“Now, is that any way to talk about your ex-partner?” Mitaka looked up. “Phasma, you’re excused.”

She huffed but turned and left, letting the door click shut behind her. 

“What do you want, Mitaka?”

“Let’s talk, man to man.”

“Well, I’m here.”

Mitaka drew two soiled highball glasses from his desk drawer, along with a fingerprint-smeared bottle of cheap whiskey. “Join me.”

Ren shook his head. “Just get to the point.”

“I’ve got at least two skin-jobs walking the streets. Remember the mining colony blowup?”

“Read about it,” Ren said.

Mitaka tossed back his whiskey in a single gulp, passing the back of his hand across his stubbled cheek. He set the glass down and poured another shot into the other glass. “C’mon, buddy.”

“I’m not your buddy.”

“I thought you’d be interested.” The fake pout that Mitaka put on made Ren bite the inside of his cheek. 

“You thought wrong.”

“I need that old blade runner back,” Mitaka said. “I need your magic.”

“Get Phasma to do it. She’s good.”

“She’s not you.”

“Listen,” Ren said, standing up, “I was quit when I came in here, and I’m twice as quit now.”

“Hey!” Mitaka stood up. As he stood up, his thighs slammed the top desk drawer closed, the metallic clang ringing through the stuffy office. “Remember what I said, Ren. If you’re not police, you’re little people.”

Ren exhaled. “No choice, huh?”

“No choice, pal.” Mitaka hit a button and a holoscreen descended from his ceiling. He tapped the right corner twice, three times. “Goddamn thing. It’s no wonder we can’t make a dent in this city. They keep handing us this second-rate equipment.” It finally flickered to hesitant life. A couple of swipes of Mitaka’s fingers and and a projection of a small, ball-like thing appeared on the glas between them. “We’ll start with the droid.”

Ren sniffed. “What does that have to do with rogue replicants?”

“Snoke Corp sent these droids out with a dispatch to the offworld mining operations,” Mitaka continued. “It looks like none too soon, considering the clusterhump on Sigma 1-M. The only problem is that _on_ Sigma 1-M the droid never reached the higher-ups.”

“So?” Ren asked. “Unlike the rest of this city, we don’t work for Snoke.”

“The spokesman I talked to said the dispatch had something to do with a new skin-job model. Nexus-7. The ones working on Sigma 1-M are all Nexus-6.”

“So,” Ren said. “Four-year lifespan. And they’re thinking the Nexus-6 models stole the droid. Why?”

“That’s your job to find out, smartass. The night of the disaster, two of them disappeared.” Mitaka dismissed the image of the BB unit droid and drew up two standard replicant profiles. “One FN model and one PO model.”

“You said ‘at least’ two.”

“An RE model disappeared a few days beforehand, and it could be here, as well.”

“And we know they’re here?”

“Yesterday, a PO model tried to infiltrate Snoke Corp,” Mitaka said. “New employee in the waste disposal unit, calling itself ‘Poe Dameron,’ went in for the standard Voigt-Kampff. They had Hald on it. Two questions in, this Poe blows Hald away with a pulse pistol. Guy’s going to need twenty inches of synth bowel.”

“Good for him,” Ren said. “Anything else?”

Mitaka smiled and sat back, staring at Ren from between the holographic legs of the FN model. “You have your assignment.”

***

Ren retscanned into his apartment, slamming the door after him and dumping the wet coat on the sagging chair in the entryway. In the kitchen, he poured himself a couple fingers of good booze, though he threw it down his throat just as readily as Mitaka had.

“Fuck,” he repeated.

Since leaving the blade runner unit, he had been contracting as independent security with the Knights, doing escorts for military brass and roughing up protesters at corporate events. It was ignominious work, but it paid a lot better than the cops did. He’d have to cancel a couple of lucrative gigs to hunt down the fugitives, but if if his track record was anything to go by he’d be back in the private sector in a couple of days. 

Before he called it quits, he had just surpassed Hald in the number of replicants retired, and Hald had seven years on him. There had been a huge remainder of them who stayed despite being outlawed on Earth. Domestic models, pleasure models. The ones that got paid, even if it was a pittance. They would have expired in time, but after the Tokyo Massacre, a skittish public wanted them off the streets and out of their houses.

It was nothing but good news for the supplanted underclasses who couldn’t afford to go off-world. And, he supposed, for the new class of mercenaries adjunct to every big-city PD.

Ren raised his vidphone screen and announced the number that Mitaka had given him. An attractive and surprisingly young receptionist answered.

“Snoke Corporation, how can I help you?” the kid asked.

“Kylo Ren. Blade runner five-six-oh-one-one. Check my license.”

“Just a moment, please.” There was silence as the kid used his desktop holoscreen, searching. “Good evening, Mr. Ren. Mr. Leech is expecting your call. Let me transfer you.”

The vid went dark only for a moment, then a red-faced man in what looked like a very illegal sealskin suit appeared. “Mr. Ren.”

“I need to see Snoke.”

“Ah,” said Leech. “The unfortunate incident with the waste disposal tech.”

“You could call it that, yeah.”

“Can you come tomorrow?”

“Got nothing better to do,” said Ren.

“Excellent,” Leech told him. “Ten hundred hours?”

“Fine.”

“He’ll see you then.”

Ren swiped the call away and lay back in his ragged armchair. With a tap of his wristcomm, slow and smoky saxophone notes curled out of the wall speakers. He didn’t remember drifting off, but the dream started as it always did. He was standing in a darkened forest, snow drifting in lazy spirals through the air and falling powdery on the ground. 

Just like every time, he moved with the torpor of dreams, as the body struggles against its sleeping state. His left hand ahead of him, his right hand heavy and dragging behind. Again, as it always did, the snow lit up red, his right hand suddenly light. He brought the flaming sword up before his eyes, and though it wiped out the snowscape before him it did not blind him. He saw straight to its glowing heart. He could feel the crackle of its energy, like a static field. It swung almost of its own accord and sliced the dream open, with nothing but black, starless void beyond.

Ren woke gasping.


	3. Los Angeles (Finn)

“Stupid, stupid move, Poe!” It wasn’t Finn but Rey who was angry.

“It was _your_ idea!”

“Not to shoot him!” Rey shouted. As she paced the groaning boards of the abandoned industrial warehouse floor, BB8 was rolling at her heels, squeaking in distress.

“The guy...Hald?” Finn asked.

Poe nodded.

“He wasn’t just a test administrator,” Finn said. “He was a blade runner. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the gun on his hip.”

“He would have retired me right there if I failed the test,” said Poe.

Rey had calmed a little. “Don’t use that word. He would have _killed_ you.”

“None of us are going to die, okay?” Finn said, moving his hands palms-down in a _settle down_ motion.

Rey took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“We think about what’s next,” said Finn. “What about one of Snoke’s suppliers?”

“Does he contract anything out?” Poe asked. “Or is everything done in-house?”

“I don’t know,” Finn said. 

“If we had a holopad we could find out,” Poe said.

“Do you even know how to use a holopad?” Rey asked.

Poe scowled but said nothing. 

“If we stole one they’d be able to trace it, anyway,” Finn said. “We’re on our own. Pounding pavement.”

“Wait,” Poe said. “When I was on my way to the interview with Snoke Corp., I saw something. It was an eye outfit. Right on the edge of the place they call Chinatown.”

“There’s a huge synthetic animal trade around here,” Finn said. “Maybe they make eyes for them.”

“Could be,” Rey said. “But they also might know who makes the eyes for Snoke.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Poe said.

“Yeah,” Rey told him. “But you’re staying here. People in this city know your face now. Me and Finn will go.”

Another scowl, but Finn could see he understood their reasoning. “I’ll wait for you here,” said Poe.

BB8 piped up with a cascade of beeping. 

“You should stay, too,” said Rey.

A dissatisfied growl of feedback.

“He might be able to watch your backs,” Poe said.

Finn nodded. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea to take him along. He looks a little like the trash pick-up droids on the street.”

“He doesn’t have arms,” Rey said.

Two hatches flipped open on BB8’s plasteel shell. Out of one unfolded a slender antenna on which a solar array bloomed. The other held a short, stubby metal appendage, from which the blue flame of a welding torch leapt. His beep was inquisitive.

Finn and Rey looked at each other.

“Good enough,” Rey said.

***

Maz Kanata’s Eye Works was housed in a narrow building near an alleyway, though it was lit with a lurid neon sign. Patrons, if one could call those seeking Maz’s services such, entered through a round door that formed the pupil of an enormous eye painted on the brick façade.

As Finn, Rey and BB8 approached the building, an unmanned dirigible floated overhead. All three hid in the shadow of the rusted metal “eyelash” awning over the door. The drone’s LED screen was lit up red and white, its loudspeaker proclaiming in a language that wasn’t Standard English the virtues of something called Coca-Cola. 

They looked at one another as it passed by then disappeared within a corona of reddish smog.

Finn was not expecting the blast of frigid air that greeted him when he pulled the door open, nor the loud music pouring out of unseen speakers and swirling around the bowl of the room. Replicants were built not to feel cold as readily as humans were, but his skin still prickled at the temperature drop. It must have been much colder inside than either he or Rey thought, because at the center of a collection of towers filled with sublimating blue solids, the small being who worked with its back turned to them was almost fully encased in a thick, fur-lined suit. Its hooded head bobbed to the beat of the strange music. 

The rumble and crunch that was BB8 traveling over the floor—so strewn with parts and broken glass it may have been more than inadvertently booby-trapped—was lost in the cacophony.

“Hey,” Finn called.

The thing didn’t answer, too absorbed in its task and too transported by the grinding roar of guitars and saxophones. 

Rey pointed to a small, rectangular pad studded with colored buttons. 

Finn lowered his eyebrows.

Rey shrugged. _Try it_.

As soon as Finn’s finger touched the large red button in the center of the pad, the music stopped, its last aborted chords still ringing among the glass tubes and decanters.

The thing in the fur suit spun, stumbling from a perch that Finn and Rey hadn’t seen. When it righted itself, it was far shorter than they had even thought. Finn faced a pair of huge and inhuman eyes, wide with confusion.

“Wha—who—what do you want?” For being in stark terror, the tiny person had a voice that was nonetheless silky and captivating.

“I’m sorry,” Finn said, though he wasn’t sure he’d ever apologized to anyone before. 

As the person stared at him, he could see now that it was a woman, her eyes magnified many times by enormous convex lenses. She snuck a hand under the fur-lined hood and hit a button, popping the lenses away from her eyes. With the magnifying glasses gone, she blinked once, twice, and stared hard at Finn’s face. “You can’t be here.”

Finn apologized again, hanging his head and pausing so long that Rey had to cut in.

“Are you Maz Kanata?” Rey asked.

“Who else would I be?” She put her hands on her hips with difficulty because of the thickness of the suit. “And who are _you_?”

“Rey. This is Finn.”

“And what generation are you?”

Finn and Rey looked at each other. 

“Nexus-6,” Rey volunteered.

Much to their surprise, Maz smiled. “I figured. Nobody walks in here without serious protection. Except for people who don’t feel it. And I do happen to believe you’re _people_.”

Finn ventured a smile.

“Do you know Snoke?” Rey asked, prompting a gentle elbow in the ribs from Finn.

Maz laughed. “Not personally, no.”

“So you don’t design eyes for him?”

“I used to. I did the eyes for the Nexus-5 line.”

“The ones that revolted in Tokyo,” Finn said.

“Anyway,” Maz said, “you don’t have to be a genius to design a human eye. Squid eyes are much more complex and well suited to their environment. Or the eyes of a hawk, say.”

“You design for synth animals now,” said Rey.

“It’s not a bad business, all things considered.”

From behind a cabinet, BB8 gave a metallic sigh.

Maz raised her almost-imperceptible eyebrows.

“Come on out, BB8,” Rey said.

“Two Nexus-6 models and a droid.” Maz shook her head. “What to do with you?”

“Three, actually,” Finn said. “There’s another one of us.”

“Right,” said Maz. “I think I might know someone who can help out.”

“Can he get us to Snoke?” asked Rey.

“He knows people who have been trying. Maybe this could be the breakthrough they need.”

“Where do we find him?”

“He’s a tough man to persuade,” Maz said. “You’ll have to use the droid as bait.”

***

What few holosheets hadn’t been trampled or wetted by the ceaseless rain tumbled and flattened themselves against the baroque support pillars of the Continental Hotel, their quavering newsprint still scrolling by. They made a bizarre constellation; the Continental’s main entrance was eclipsed by the shadow of a taller building, giving the appearance of permanent nightfall over the street. In a way, Rey found it strangely comforting, the glowing ‘sheets studding the blackness reminiscent of the stars over Sigma 1-M. She had not seen a single star since arriving at the Port of Los Angeles. Not one.

She shifted her feet, giving a little stretch to locked-up muscles where she crouched in a corner behind what used to be a public vidphone. BB8 gave a soft beep from where he was partially concealed by a pile of burned-out ‘sheets and cellose takeout bags.

“Shh,” Rey said. They had been waiting in the shadow of the Continental for three hours. The street echoed her hushing with what took her a couple of disorganized moments to figure out was the sluice of old-fashioned tires through water.

An ancient vehicle pulled up to the curb, its engine choking before shutting down. A man in heavy boots and a grimy oilskin jacket climbed out, huffing a great breath into the stillness of the street. His head of white hair was briefly illuminated by the car’s interior light. He stepped up onto the drive and looked around him as if he had expected to be followed.

Primed to perfection, BB8 set his infrared window to a feeble flash. 

The man jumped back, though Rey could see the action pained him, pulling an electroshocker from his belt. The tip jumped and sparked with wild, white light. Apparently, though, what he saw with the aid of its illumination made him switch it off.

BB8 groaned.

“Holy shit,” the man said in a voice that itself sounded as rusty and tired as BB8 was meant to look. He poked the droid once with the deadened tip of the electroshocker, and received another groan in response.

At that point, Rey shot up from her concealed spot and pointed the useless pulse pistol at the man’s face. “Han Solo?”

“Who wants to know?” He held the shocker out in front of him but did not turn it back on.

“I hear you repair droids.”

“Something like that.” Solo lowered his hand and slipped the shocker back into his belt holster, continuing to hold his other hand out in front of him. “You want me to look at yours?”

Rey gave a slow nod.

“Why don’t you put down the gun and we’ll go upstairs? I’ll take a look at it. Huh? Just put the gun down.” Solo gave a glance at BB8, a long enough one that Rey knew his curiosity had been piqued.

She made the mistake of looking down at BB8 as well, because Solo lunged and snatched the pistol from her hand. He smirked. “Sorry, sweetheart. Appointments only.” He tossed the gun into the street behind him. “And next time you wanna threaten a guy, make sure your gun is loaded.”

“Maz Kanata sent me!” Rey said as Solo was turning toward the door.

He swiveled on his heel. “She did, huh?” He took a couple of deep breaths through his nose, then said, “Fine. Can the droid get up the stairs? The elevator’s been broken for months.”

At that, BB8 sprung to tweeting, shrilling life.

Solo sniffed. “Thought so.” He opened the heavy front door. “Come on, then.” 

Rey and BB8 sprang up the stairs, but Solo was winded by the time they made it to the fourth floor. “Do me a favor, kid,” he said, propping his hands on his knees. “Don’t ever get old.”

“I won’t,” Rey said.

She leapt back from the door when from behind it came a harsh series of staccato vocalizations, wordless and urgent. 

Solo pounded his fist against the door. “Chewie, calm down.” He turned to Rey. “He knows when I have guests, which is never.”

A rich smell flowed out of the room as Solo opened the door.

Rey could tell it was food, though she’d never smelled anything like it. Her eyes widened as she stepped inside and was confronted with the face of a huge, shaggy hound, growling. “Is that a dog?”

“Chewie takes concerns about my safety very seriously. Down, boy. Geddoff.”

The dog turned and followed him into the huge suite, sneaking glances back at Rey and BB8.

Rey shut the door behind her. “He’s synthetic.”

“Nope,” Solo said. “One hundred percent real. Irish wolfhound. I smuggled him off Coruscant Colony.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught?”

“Aren’t _you_?”

“Oh, just in time!” a strangely accented voice announced. A shining humanoid figure tottered out of the kitchenette, a soiled chef’s hat perched improbably on its head. “I’ve made your favorite. Protein block curry!”

“You know I hate that shit, Threepio,” Solo said, tossing his jacket onto the battered sofa.

“Well,” the droid said. “I _see_.”

“You want something to eat?” Solo asked.

Rey nodded.

He tilted his chin in the direction of the droid. “I’ll take a beer, too.”

With a huff, it made a painstaking turn and shuffled back into the kitchen. 

“Sit down,” Solo said.

Rey didn’t move.

He lowered himself onto the sofa, grimacing. “So, how’s the weather offworld?”

Rey’s brow furrowed, but she still said nothing.

“I’ve seen your models around a few times.”

A small droid rolled out on wheels that seemed too small even for the threshold between living room and kitchenette. A little of the fragrant curry sauce slopped onto the floor from a steaming plate, but Rey was too hungry to give it much thought.

The taller droid waddled out, an open bottle of beer in hand.

“Tuck in,” said Solo, taking a sip of the beer. 

Rey hesitated only for a moment, then began to shove huge forkfulls into her mouth.

The humanoid droid made a throat-clearing noise. 

“Thanks,” said Solo, a grudging tone in his voice. “I guess you could call these guys my friends. I built them.”

“I have friends,” Rey said. “Two of them.”

BB8 gave an indignant hoot. 

“Three,” she corrected. “I need to let the other two know where I am.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game,” Solo said. “But you know that.”

Rey put the fork down and nodded. 

“My question is, why? What are you doing on Earth?”

“Dying, Han Solo. We’re dying.”


	4. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

Day dawned a gray thing, not gradual at all. It wasn’t, and then it suddenly was. Ren saw because he’d been sitting up all night watching the flares and hovercars through the transparisteel window. Squares of half-light crawled across the floor, crept up the boots he’d never taken off, up his knees.

He rinsed his mouth out with whiskey and changed clothes, eschewing the refresher for now. Phasma had agreed with reluctance to pick him up at his building and drop him off at the Snoke Corporation tower. She could go grab an early lunch or sit on the landing pad and brood for all he cared, but Ren had made it clear he was going in alone.

Perhaps it was his imagination, but the hoverpatrol unit seemed a little shaky after its encounter with the cop shop landing pad the day before. It could just be Phasma manhandling the thing in her ire at being left out of the loop. Ren decided to throw her a bone.

“Going in later to the apartment the PO model put down as his address.”

“Good,” she said. 

“I could use some backup.”

“You sure about that? Seems like you’ve got everything under control.” The bitterness was as unmistakable as it was irritating. 

“You want to wait around in the station that’s fine by me.”

“I’m already waiting around,” she said, swerving around a sudden flare from one of the refinery towers. 

The red-gold flame recalled the burning sword in his dream. His _dreams_. He’d been having them for as long as he could remember. Ren shook the image out of his head. “Up to you,” he told Phasma.

She didn’t respond, but it was also time to concentrate on setting the unruly hovercar down on the Snoke Tower landing pad. 

Ren opened the door.

“Jump out again and I swear I’ll have your balls.”

He hauled his Voigt-Kampff kit out of the space between the seat and the center console. “I’ll comm you when I’m done.”

The oily and solicitous Leech met him at the rooftop door. From there, they took a conveyor across a transparisteel-encased bridge and up into the tower proper. Only Eldon Snoke would insist on having his landing pad at a lower level than his suites instead of on top of the building like everyone else in the city did.

No one was higher, and no one could be. Father and god to a thousand thousand children.

Leech, wordless, left Ren at the door to a large room paneled with huge windows. The ceiling was so lofty it nearly disappeared in the gloom from the day’s smog and from the autofilming over the transparisteel. All was silent.

There was a slight displacement of the still air as the door closed behind him, and a more startling one as something flew past a few feet from his head. Ren flinched back and heard soft laughter.

From the other end of the room, a figure emerged from behind the shadow of a pillar, its footsteps ringing on the marble. A man, dressed in black, his high-necked suit pressed and peaked with military precision. He was pale, with fastidiously tamed red hair pushed back from a broad brow. His expression was disapproving, but his lips were just this side of too lush to convey true severity.

“Do you like our owl?” the man asked.

Ren looked over his other shoulder. A massive bird, its face a white moon, clung with its raptor’s claws to a satin-finish brass perch by the door. 

“It’s real?” Ren asked.

“Of course,” the man said.

“Must be expensive.”

“Very.”

“Mr. Ren.” Another voice, as crisp and hard-edged as the shoulders of the red-haired man’s uniform. Snoke wore soft shoes so his footsteps did not echo, but his presence was commanding nonetheless.

“Kylo Ren, Dr. Eldon Snoke,” said the red-haired man.

“Thank you, Hux.” Snoke said.

The great inventor was more wizened than Ren had expected, and his eyes had the telltale green sheen of corneal implants. A round scar like a cigarette burn twisted the left corner of his mouth down, making even the thinnest smile seem terribly lopsided.

He did not extend his hand to shake Ren’s. “I see you’ve met Hux.”

Ren nodded. The man Snoke called Hux didn’t move and was not dismissed, but stood with lips pursed in distaste. “One of your droids disappeared with classified company information,” Ren said.

“Not so much ‘disappeared’ as ‘was taken from me,’” said Snoke.

“Why send a droid? Why not far-comm it over a secure channel?”

“There is no such thing as a secure channel, Mr. Ren.”

“And the information it was carrying,” Ren said. “Information on a new model. Nexus-7 generation.”

“Correct. All very experimental. None have been deployed. As yet.”

“So you’re saying you have one? Here?”

Snoke looked at Ren with half-lidded eyes, a wry smile on his lips. “That would be illegal, Mr. Ren.”

“Don’t jerk me around, Snoke.”

“Watch yourself,” Hux said.

Snoke waved a hand. “It’s all right, Hux. Mr. Ren here is just doing his job. In answer to your question: yes, I do.”

“I want to test it.”

“I’ve never seen the test. I want to see it work on a person. I’d like to see a negative result before I provide you with a positive.”

“What would be the point of that?”

“Indulge me.”

“On you?” Ren asked. 

Snoke extended a thin hand toward Hux. “Try him.”

Hux gave a tight smile and nodded in his employer’s direction. 

Ren slung the briefcase containing the test equipment onto a long table near the window and gestured for Hux to sit down across from him.

“This is to be an empathy test, then,” Snoke said, his lilting tone meant to imply curiosity. “Emotional response, fluctuation of the pupil…”

“I thought you said you’d never seen the test before,” Ren said. 

“I know of it. Named for the scientists who created it.”

“That’s right. Voigt-Kampff.”

“Mind if I smoke?” Hux asked, now seated across from the slender arm of the machine’s ocular window.

“It won’t affect the test,” Ren told him.

Hux pulled a slim, brass cigarette case and a lighter from a discreet pocket in his suit. The smell on his first exhale told Ren that these were old-fashioned smokes—pricey—not the sterilized anti-cancer ones sold on the streets.

The set of Hux’s face was hard as he peered into the ocular window. “Ready when you are, Mr. Ren.”

“It’s your birthday,” Ren began. “Someone gives you a real calfskin wallet—”

“I’d report him to the police,” said Hux.

“Fair enough. You’re out walking. There’s a street vendor—”

“Do you make up these questions, Mr. Ren?” Hux took a long drag on the cigarette, the column of ash growing, though he made no attempt to flick it off into the ashtray by his elbow. He ran the fingers of his other hand across the mandarin collar of his suit as if it unduly constrained him.

“No.”

“Did Doctors Voigt and Kampff create them?” Hux licked his lips, at last tapping the cigarette gently.

“Some of them, yes.” The one fair-lashed green eye on which Ren had focused the ocular window flicked a glance toward Snoke.

“Then they must be out of date,” Hux said, adding, “Some of them,” with a very slight sneer.

Ren didn’t have to look at Snoke to know he was amused. Still, he was surprised that he was less incensed at the interruptions than he might have been in any other test situation. He studied Hux’s face, which was far from a blank wall. It fairly danced with micro-expressions: condescension, assuredness, irritation...worry?

“There’s a street vendor selling food. You approach him and he offers you a free hit of synthamphetamine.”

“I wouldn’t take it.” Hux tilted his head.

“Try to keep still. You come across a full-page nude photo of a man in an art magazine—”

“Is this testing whether I’m a replicant, or whether I’m gay, Mr. Ren?”

Snoke laughed aloud.

Ren gritted his teeth.

Without looking at the ashtray, Hux stubbed out the cigarette. Ren watched him trace through the ashes with his slim, white forefinger, then rub the greasy gray material on the pad of his thumb.

Hux’s eyes closed as he brought the fingers up to his nose, taking in the sent of spent nicotine.

“Try to hold still,” Ren said, but it was low, choked. “You’re watching the vidscreen when you see a spider crawling on your arm—”

“I’d let it go.”

“Why?”

A slight upward curl of the soft lips. “Nobody makes synth spiders, Mr. Ren. It would have to be real.”

“You feel compassion for it?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“No.” _It also wasn’t a standard follow-up question._ “Can we continue?”

Hux pushed his palm over the hard shell of his sculpted hair. “Of course.”

***

An hour later, beads of sweat had begun to collect around Ren’s hairline. “Just one more question. Your brother wants to take his disabled son to the clinic for gene therapy, even though it will be expensive and painful for the boy. Do you try to dissuade him?”

“No,” said Hux. He let the smoke from his third cigarette drift lazily upward from between parted lips.

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t presume to know what’s best for his family.”

“But you’re his family, too.”

Hux said nothing.

“I think that’s enough,” Snoke said. “Thank you, Hux. Please excuse us.”

Eyes narrowing slightly at Ren, Hux stood, his stiff posture unchanging. He nodded once again at Snoke and walked toward the rear door of the room, the heels of his shoes clipping with each step.

Ren didn’t even wait until Hux was out the door. “He’s a replicant.”

“Very good, Mr. Ren.”

“Does he know?”

“He suspects.”

“How can it not know what it is?”

“Memories, Mr. Ren. More human than human—that’s our motto here at Snoke Corporation. We implant them with life experiences. We find, ironically enough, that emotional ties make them easier to sway. ”

“ _Them_? There’s more than one?”

“I’m speaking generally. Hux is, as far as we know, one of a kind.”

“I’d say keep it under wraps,” Ren said, “but I know you will.”

“Yes, I’d be much obliged if you wouldn’t retire my creation.”

“Three of your ‘creations’ are planetside as we speak, Snoke.”

“I’ll stick to things I can control, Mr. Ren.”

***

He expected Phasma to be fuming when she got the comm, but the peace offering earlier in the hovercar must have mollified her.

“One-eleven Hunterwasser,” she said.

“What?” Ren asked.

“The hotel. Where the replicant said it lived.”

“Got a room number?”

Phasma shook her head. “Guess we’re breaking down doors.”

Ren turned to the window in order that Phasma not see his slim smile. The replicant—Hux—had a habit of quirking that same sort of joyless smile during the course of the test. 

It had taken just under a hundred and twenty questions for Ren to be sure what he was looking at. Typical Nexus-6 models might take forty or fifty questions max before the test outed them. Hux was prone to minute pupillary dilations in response to the test’s scenarios. 

And it was hard not to notice the way its lips trembled around the cigarette, the exaggerated and slow blink of its eyes setting such a stark contrast to its rigid affect. 

_He suspects_.

Ren had lost an entire question when Hux placed a fingertip softly at the corner of its mouth. Whether it was done to appear pensive or naive, he had no idea. He’d had the urge to place his own fingertip against his lips, to mirror the replicant’s gesture.

Perhaps out of a fit of vicarious pleasure, Snoke had made all of his replicants beautiful as well as functional. The PO and FN models that Mitaka had shown him were stunning feats of engineering. The petite RE model did not so much appear willowy as lithe and dangerous, wickedly fast. 

But Hux was something different altogether. Pallid, freckled skin where many of the other models were swarthy. It ( _he?_ ) seemed precariously settled in its own body, an uneasy mix of the emotional and the physical, whereas other replicants were fully rooted by design. Altogether new, not so much unseated in certainty but not having been gifted certainty in the first place.

“Heads up, blade runner,” Phasma said, slicing his reverie.

They could see the giant marquee that read “Yukon” from several streets away. “Looks like a quality establishment,” Ren said, raising his eyebrows. He slid the test kit from his lap into the car’s footwell and prepped to disembark one street over from the hotel.

Pulse pistols still holstered, Phasma and Ren rounded the block and approached the Yukon Hotel. There were no lights on in the building and the door was chained shut.

“Figures,” Phasma said.

“There are other ways in here,” said Ren. He pulled his gun and fired twice into the heavy padlock. It cracked and melted from the chain, sliding halfway down the door before fusing to the ancient steel.

Phasma shook her head but drew her pistol and followed Ren into the darkened lobby. 

Just over an hour’s time told them that the building had held no signs of life for a long while. Ren would kick locked doors down only to find the rooms deserted, sometimes with the odd piece of stained, dust-covered furniture, but mostly bare, warped boards and stinking carpet.

Phasma had taken to hanging back, allowing Ren to tear through the rooms in increasingly frustrated furor. 

“Fuck!” he shouted after clearing a top-floor penthouse. It had once been a fairly nice retreat, with floor-to-ceiling windows that put him somewhat in mind of Snoke’s viewing room, even through the red haze of his vision.

“There’s nothing here,” Phasma said, her tone light, maybe even taunting.

Ren whirled on her. He could feel the hot blood suffusing his face. “Fuck!”

Phasma stepped forward and placed a small object on the long, low table that remained in front of the window.

It was an origami crane, made from a cellose chewing gum wrapper. Ren picked it up and crushed it in his hand. Then he kicked the table through the window. A galaxy of shards flew outward then fell, preceding by a split second the raw thump and crack of the wood breaking on the pavement outside. 

Ren was breathing hard, staring at the damage he had wreaked when something slipped by the glass in a window of the warehouse across the street.

“Ren—” Phasma began.

“Shh.” He held his hand up toward her. “There’s something in that building.”

A dirigible passed overhead, close enough to nearly hit the still-lit sign at the top of the hotel, hawking synth sushi from a place near Sunset. 

Reflections in the glass again. A misty rain began to drift down from low clouds. Ren gestured to Phasma. “Go, go.”

They took the stairs down to the lobby and picked their way through the glass. The main door to the warehouse swung slightly open, inviting. Ren drew it back on rusty hinges. 

A solid punch from the darkness within connected with his cheek and sent his pulse pistol flying out of his hand. 

Phasma took aim and fired into the space where Ren had been standing, but the assailant had already started running. Ren was picking himself up as Phasma rushed past with heavy but sure footsteps. He retrieved the gun, feeling the bruise already begin to bloom on his cheekbone. A quick run of the finger around his mouth. Nothing seemed broken; no teeth lost. He spat blood and followed Phasma.

“Stop!” she was shouting at the retreating figure as it took a winding set of stairs leading to a loft two at a time.

Ren aimed and fired, meaning to kneecap the guy, but the shot was absorbed by the metal of the stairs. One step quivered and broke, sending the whole structure shuddering. The fugitive tripped, but righted himself at once. Phasma was struggling up the stairs, and Ren ran to the back of the warehouse. There was a bare-bones elevator behind a non-load-bearing wall. It started moving when he pressed the button.

Upstairs, the man hadn’t noticed the squeal of the elevator, as he was facing down Phasma and her pistol. 

“Get down on the ground,” she said. And to Ren, “It’s a PO!”

“I want it alive!” Ren shouted.

The man spun toward Ren, unbalanced by the new presence. Phasma clubbed him on the back of the head with the butt of her pistol. He stumbled, and Ren dove for his legs, taking him down hard against the perforated steel of the catwalk.

Ren grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head down. Then he wrapped his hands around the replicant’s neck and began to squeeze.

“Ren,” said Phasma.

He doubled down on the pressure.

“Ren!”

At last he removed his hands and the thing below him coughed and spat into the air, heaving. Ren rolled him over by the shoulders and twisted his hands behind his back, snapping the magnacuffs brutally tight on his wrists.

“Let’s find your friends,” Ren said. “Shall we?”


	5. Los Angeles (Poe)

Poe had no idea how long he’d been shackled to the chair in the interrogation room. The chair was bolted to the floor, the magnacuff that restrained his left hand soldered to its arm. All he knew was that his spine was going stiff and his ass was going numb, and he’d rather someone just came in and said or did something.

Or so he thought.

The woman who had knocked him with the butt of her pistol finally opened the door. She was huge—tall and broad—and wore a neutral expression. She had a cup in her hand, which she set down on the table beside Poe.

“Do you drink coffee?” she asked.

“Are you asking if I drink coffee specifically, or if I drink anything at all?”

“Either.”

“We’re not robots,” Poe said. “We’re flesh and blood. No different from you.”

“Forgive me if I don’t believe that,” the woman said.

As if to answer her, Poe used his free hand to pick up the cup. The coffee tasted like dirt, but it was hot and he was thirsty.

“I’m Detective Phasma,” she said.

“Under different circumstances, I’d say ‘nice to meet you.’ So are you going to Voigt-Kampff me, or what?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary, considering.”

Poe smirked. “Well, I didn’t get to finish the last one.”

“That’s entirely your fault, replicant.”

“You could at least call me ‘Poe.’”

“Fine. Poe. Whatever. You killed one of our best men.”

“If he was one of the best I’d hate to see the bad ones.”

“Keep it up and you _will_ see one of the bad ones,” Phasma said, narrowing her eyes.

Poe let out a long breath. “I don’t have due process—on this planet or any other. Why am I here? Why not just retire me now?”

“You know why. You have two accomplices out there still, and possibly a droid.”

Poe leaned back and set the near-empty cellose cup on the table. “In replicant-speak, we call them ‘friends.’”

“Your ‘friends’ aren’t here,” said Phasma. 

“I don’t know where they are.”

“Bullshit. You know and you’re going to tell me.”

“I don’t think so.”

At that moment the man who had tried to choke him walked into the room. Poe had to suppress a smile. The man’s face was bruised and there was a cut on his high cheekbone.

Phasma sniffed. “Then you’re going to tell _him_.” She slipped out of the room, ducking below the doorframe, with a last look toward Poe. 

He thought he saw something like sympathy in her gaze. _Here we go_. “So,” Poe said, “who talks first? Do I talk? Do you?” 

Metal flashed in the harsh overhead lights then Poe’s jaw bloomed with agony. He felt skin split and drops of blood begin to patter onto his thigh.

The man wiped his brass knuckles with the opposite sleeve. “You talk.”

“And why should I talk to you?”

“Because I’m going to hurt you,” Ren said.

“You’re going to hurt me anyway.”

“Fair enough.” He backhanded Poe with the brass knuckles still in place. Blood misted into the air and fell across the surface of the steel table. 

Poe dribbled more blood onto his lap. 

“Where are your associates?”

“I don’t know.”

Ren plowed his fist into Poe’s solar plexus, leaving him gasping. “Wrong answer.”

Wheezing, Poe managed to grind out, “They left me in the warehouse. I can’t exactly show my face too many places in this town.”

“Not that your face is going to look much like it did before.” 

A right hook burst the skin over Poe’s cheek. He heard a crack as part of the bone gave way. Tears began to slip from his eyes unbidden. “You keep hitting me like this I won’t be able to tell you anything.” The words were mush in his mouth.

Ren nodded. “You’re right.” He grabbed Poe’s hair and tilted his bruised, bleeding face up into the pitiless fluorescent lights.

When he let it go, Poe’s head sagged, lolling on his neck. His entire face felt like it was on fire. He started when he felt Ren’s hand gripping his own. 

Ren flicked his wrist and snapped the smallest finger at the middle joint.

Poe howled through clenched teeth.

“Where are your associates?” Ren asked again.

Poe was breathing hard, the pain from his broken finger radiating up his arm to the shoulder. “I don’t know.”

Ren broke his third finger.

This time, Poe gave in and screamed.

“Give them up, and the pain will stop.”

“Han Solo,” he breathed. “Someone named Han Solo.”

“That’s who they’re with?”

“I think so. Finn told me about him.”

“Finn, huh?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Ren went to the door and opened it. “Phasma, look up whatever we have on a ‘Han Solo.’ See if he’s got a record.” He turned back to Poe. “Good. Very good.”

Poe bit his cheek to dull the pain in his hand. He spat blood on the floor. “Have what you need?”

“We’ll see.”

Phasma came in the room with her holopad, only flicking her gaze up at the wreck that was Poe. “Looks like we’ve got a hit. Possession of prohibited droids. Looks like he did a stint at Terminal Island.”

“Do we have an address?” 

“No idea whether it’s current. But yeah, he gave one.”

“Good,” Ren said. 

Poe felt the nudge of a pulse pistol muzzle against his temple.

“Wake up,” said Ren. “Time to die.”

Poe only had time to hear the pistol warming up before a commotion outside in the main lobby distracted his captors. What he could only assume was a beat cop came running with a heavy, slapping tread. 

“Two skin-jobs just came in. Said they wanna turn themselves in,” he breathed.

Poe snapped his head up. “No.”

“Yes,” Ren said, then swung the door open and stepped into the hall. No sooner had he done so than Poe saw him hit with the bolt of a stunner. He went down writhing.

Phasma fired her pistol but Poe could hear it as the shot careened off something down the hall. Then she, too, was taken down with a stun bolt. 

Warbling and squeaking, BB8—his stun cannon smoking—rolled over their prone bodies and into the room. He gave a moan of distress when he saw Poe’s face. Poe smiled through the agony and hugged the droid before BB8 severed the manacle with a plasma cutter and set him free.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, tucking his useless left hand up by his side.

The station was full of twitching bodies. Finn and Rey grinned at first, then each of their faces fell when they saw the shape that Poe was in. 

“Which one did it?” Finn asked.

“We don’t have time for that,” said Poe, stepping with effort over the quivering legs of a stunned cop. 

Rey shook her head, brows furrowed. Still, she said, “He’s right. We have to get out of here.”

The cop behind Poe was already coming out of the stunner trance. He struggled to sit up. “Start running, you fucks.”

Poe smiled, then punched him hard on the jaw with his good right hand. “I’ve got a better idea.” He kicked the unconscious cop over and found the keyfob on his belt, nearly ripping the leather apart to get at it. “To the roof.”

Finn took Rey’s hand as they ran down the hallway, but she shook out of his grip with what was almost an offended expression. BB8 rolled wildly, careering into walls.

“How will we know which one’s his?” Rey yelled at Poe.

“Whichever one starts,” he said, turning his head and sending droplets of blood back over his shoulder.

Finn winced in vicarious pain. 

At the elevator bay, Poe was about to slam the button when Finn stopped him, pointing to a sign posted by the left-hand stall. _Elevators will be out of service when alarm sounds._

“If we trip the alarm, we’ll have to take the stairs,” Poe said.

“So will they,” said Finn. 

Poe and Rey nodded, and Rey broke the glas covering the alarm switch with her fist. After a nod from Finn, she pulled it. The corridor went dark and yellow emergency lighting leapt into being, giving their shadows strange angles and monstrous shapes. The alarm itself was a heavy, intermittent buzzing that made all of them but BB8 flinch at the sheer volume.

As they were emerging on the roof, Poe heard the click of the door opening a few stories below, heard shouting voices. When he and Rey and Finn and BB8 were all outside, he handed off the key fob to Finn. “Find the car. Hurry. BB8, can you weld this door shut?”

A coo and a beep.

“I’m going to take that as an affirmative.”

BB8 flipped open a hatch on his side and a welding torch emerged, dripping blue flame. 

“Hurry,” Poe said. 

“Poe!” Finn yelled. “We found it!”

Voices behind the door. The seam of the weld was too new; it was already beginning to crack. “Coming!”

Finn and Rey were standing, shifting quickly from foot to foot, in the yellowish fog that enveloped the police station. Lights from a hoverpatrol unit beckoned.

“I don’t know how to drive this,” Finn said. “Do you?”

Poe held up his injured hand.

“I can,” Rey said. 

“Quick, Rey,” Finn said. “They’re going to be able to get through that door any minute.”

“I need a co-pilot,” she said, swinging into the driver’s seat. “Poe?” 

He nodded and got in next to her. Finn and BB8 ducked into the transparisteel-enclosed rear cabin.

Rey flipped a couple of levers. The car gave a hiccup but didn’t otherwise move. As she went for another lever, Poe put his hand out.

“You have to purge the the intake reserves or you’ll blow us off-planet,” he said.

“I knew that,” said Rey, slamming a button in the center console. The car lurched and steam billowed from vents near the running boards. “Thrusters are go.”

As the fog swirled away, Poe saw that the cops had broken through the hastily welded door. At the fore were the two blade runners, the tall, blonde one—Phasma—and the dark-haired one who’d taken such delight in hurting him. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to look back out at the lights of the city unfolding beneath them. “Punch it,” he said.

Rey did not hesitate to step on the gas. The hovercar reared up, then leveled out as it took off. The first sirens behind them had begun to blare. She guided it between two office towers, swerving just before the flare that was past the towers roared up. 

Poe could feel the scalding heat on his face even through the transparisteel. 

Another car had come up behind them, red and blue lights dancing abstract over the tendrils of curling fog. 

Rey looked back. 

“Watch out!” Finn said, pointing ahead of them.

A dirigible had lumbered into their flight path, some of the LED lights on its broad screens flickering or burned out so it made the thirty-foot-tall image of a geisha look unresolved, distant. The ad drone itself was _not_ distant. 

Rey yanked on the vertical control, flipping the car ninety degrees and engaging the rear thrusters as if to climb an invisible cliff face. She leveled it out close enough to knock the undercarriage on the top of the dirigible. 

“Damn,” Poe said. “You’re one hell of a driver.”

The closest cop car smacked into the dirigible. They could hear the crackle of plasteel and the ad balloon’s sound dopplering down into whatever unfortunate city street it landed on. Rey lifted above the fog, but suddenly a barrage of flashing lights was behind them. 

“Pull over _now_ ,” came the loudspeaker from the head car.

Poe stifled a laugh.

The cars began to cluster around them. Poe could see through the window the face of the dark-haired man, his eyes narrowed, teeth bared. Then Rey cut the thrusters entirely. The car wobbled on its remaining momentum, then dropped out of the sky.

“You’re going to kill us!” Finn said. 

“No, I’m not,” said Rey, calm and cool. “Just wait.”

“Re-engage thrusters now, Rey,” Poe told her.

“Wait!”

“Now!”

"Wait."

Poe's stomach was in his throat.

“Now,” Rey said, and re-engaged about ten meters from the street. Crowds of people carrying visibrellas scattered. She set the car down with a bone-rattling thump; Poe winced as his broken fingers were jostled.

“We have to get out of here,” Finn said. “Now.”

The four of them stumbled out of the car and Poe led them down an alleyway where they could catch their breath. 

“I’m sorry,” Poe said, a tear falling into the cut on his cheekbone.

“For what?” asked Rey.

“I gave them what they wanted. I told them about Han Solo.”

“They tortured you,” said Finn.

“I didn’t want to give in.”

“We’re on the run, anyway,” Finn said. “It was just a matter of time.”

“So what do we do now?” Poe asked.

“Get back to Han and warn him they’re coming,” Rey said. “He’s our only hope.”


	6. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

Ren didn’t care that they’d had to have the abandoned hoverpatrol unit towed back to the station after he’d kicked and punched its instrument panel into utter uselessness. Mitaka would bawl him out halfheartedly, but he wouldn’t be taken off the case. Not after the humiliation suffered at the cop shop.

Phasma had waited with grim patience outside the car as he’d done it, watching the sparks flying and fizzling out on the transparisteel. At last he had stood in the street, chest heaving, knuckles bloody and studded with dashboard glas. 

“Go home,” Phasma said. “Get some rest. You’re going to be feeling that stun bolt for at least a few hours.”

“No. We’re checking on that address for Solo. If you don’t want to come with me, fine.” Ren tapped his wristcomm and the saved image from the police files leapt glowing from its face. “Seven McGill Street, unit R-two. You coming or not?”

Phasma sighed and nodded, moving toward the intact car with the stiff and limping unease of a stunner victim. Cops used to use them once upon a time until the streets got too dangerous for anything but full-on pulse guns. 

The few lights that were on in the McGill Street building were scattered across its face like broken teeth, but at least that meant life. The edifice was arranged in a semi-circular fashion around a grungy center courtyard that bristled with eroded children’s play equipment. It had been a long time—years, probably—since Ren had seen a kid in the city. Los Angeles in 2092 wasn’t a place to grow up; it wasn’t a place to grow anything.

He and Phasma took the stairs on the right-hand side of the lobby to the second floor. R-two was all the way down on the left. The scum of dust over the old-fashioned doorknob did not bode well for success, but Ren tried the door anyway. It was unlocked, the rooms beyond it bare as they possibly could be, with plumbing fixtures ripped out of walls, leaving spongy sections of rotted floor in arcs around the dangling lines.

“Somebody gave this place the once-over before we got to it,” Phasma said. She gave the light switch an ineffective flick.

“Yeah,” said Ren. He pulled the glowtorch out of his belt and scanned the walls. “If Solo ever lived here, it hasn’t been for a while.” He re-housed the torch and scratched one of his tingling knuckles. With one ragged nail he managed to gouge out a teardrop of glas. He flicked it free of his fingers and it fell to the floor, cushioned by scabbing blood.

“Back to square one,” Phasma said.

“Maybe,” said Ren. “Maybe.”

***

It had just begun to rain again when he reached his building. At least the heavy, sulfurous fog had cleared. 

Ren deposited the bloody brass knuckles from his pocket onto the table and left a trail of noisome clothing through the flat on his way to the refresher. Wracked with shivers and covered in gooseflesh, he nonetheless let the water run cold, let it slip over and through the wounds on his hands. He was standing on the threadbare bath mat, a towel around his waist, picking with steel forceps at a shard that had winnowed its way underneath a prominent vein on the back of his hand when he heard the knock on the door.

Scowling, he shrugged on a bathrobe and walked out to the entryway, leaving moist footprints in his wake. Ren couldn’t have been more shocked when he opened the slider on the transparisteel viewscreen to get a look at his visitor. 

The replicant from Snoke Corp. _Hux_. That was his name. 

He wore an impatient expression, lips compressed into a tight, white line, almost imperceptible brows lowered over his eyes.

Ren was too tired and his reflexes too taxed to duck the fist that came flying at him when he opened the door. It connected with his nose, sending a hot gush of red down his chin and chest. “Fuck!” He staggered back, his vision going purple at the edges.

Hux let himself into the room, pushing the door shut with an offhand gentleness none of which he’d lent to the moments prior. 

Ren only saw black trousers, shoes of such a satiny sheen they looked as though they’d been spit-polished right before he walked in the door. “What the hell was that for?”

“You know just what that was for,” Hux told him. 

Ren cinched the bathrobe tighter around his waist and let the towel fall, scooping it up below the hem of the robe to bring it up to his face. Now that the haze had cleared a little, he took in the slim trousers and their perfect creases. The man looked as if he had no rain at all on him. Hux wore a black changshan with frog closures, bordered in green silk. His hair retained its sculptural perfection. 

Looking at Hux’s face above the fuzz of the towel, Ren saw that his expression had softened a little. The man—the replicant, he reminded himself—almost looked lost now, puzzled as to why he’d done what he had only a minute before.

“You’re hurt,” Hux said. 

“You punched me in the face.”

“I mean your hands.”

Ren pulled the towel away from his face, wincing at the sticking of fibers in the congealing blood. “It’s nothing.” He wrinkled his nose a couple of times. It smarted, but it wasn’t broken. 

“Then what a strong man you are, Mr. Ren.” Hux said it with utter disdain. 

“Will you let me clean up a little? I can’t be a _proper host_ with blood all over me.”

Hux sniffed. “From what I understand, that’s a state you’re commonly in.”

“Oh yeah? How do you figure?” Ren looked down at the ruined bathrobe. His blood was bright on the white fabric.

“In your line of work, it _is_ a hazard,” said Hux. “You have a cut on your cheek, as well.”

“Thanks for noticing.”

Hux stepped past Ren into the apartment proper. He looked over the bare walls, the sagging furniture.

“No comments on my décor?” Ren asked, following. “It’s certainly not what you’re used to.”

“You wouldn’t know a thing about what I’m used to.” Still, Hux traced two pale fingers over the back of the wing chair, rounding its bulk to run them over the mostly empty bookshelves. 

Ren watched their smooth progress, breathing through his mouth.

“Not a man of letters, are we, Mr. Ren?”

Ren narrowed his eyes. “I have a particular set of skills. Books don’t really figure into it. Give me a minute.”

Ren ducked into his bedroom, leaving the bloody towel on the bed and hastily pulling on a battered pair of slacks and a t-shirt. He didn’t really want Hux out of his sight. Maybe he didn’t want to be out of Hux’s sight. He ducked into the bathroom and ran some water over his face and neck, watching it swirl pink into the porcelain bowl of the sink. He came out with a new towel, drying his skin, somewhat amused to see smudges of red still on the cloth.

Hux was still there, back turned, his posture just as improbable as it had been during the Voigt-Kampff test. Ren imagined the green eyes flickering over his meager possessions. Assessing.

“Want a drink?”

Hux turned. “It’s starting to bruise.”

Ren huffed a humorless laugh. “One to remember you by?”

“Well, according to Eldon Snoke, I _am_ one of a kind.” 

“You were listening. After the test.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Hux asked, raising a pale eyebrow.

“Does Snoke know you’re out?”

“I’m not a _pet_ , Mr. Ren. I have agency.”

“I never said you didn’t.”

“You implied it.”

“What’s there to imply? I haven’t known you very long, but I know enough to figure out you’re not stupid.”

“Don’t expect me to thank you,” Hux said.

“I honestly don’t know what to expect,” said Ren. It was as true a phrase as he had ever spoken.

Hux tipped his chin. “Why do you have a piano?”

“It was my mother’s.”

“An unexpected burst of sentiment from such a tough customer.” Hux walked over to the piano, picked up one of the old-fashioned digital picture frames. “Is this your mother?”

“Great-grandmother.”

“Did she play the piano?”

“I don’t know,” Ren said.

“I remember...lessons,” said Hux. “Do you play?”

“No.”

“But you like music, Mr. Ren.”

“Some.”

“Why keep it here?”

“I don’t want to pay to have it dragged out. A cop’s salary isn’t all that impressive.” Ren watched the column of Hux’s neck above the collar of the changshan.

“Ah, but you retired. You work personal security.” Hux’s laugh was empty, brittle. “You retired, and then you retired from retiring.”

“How do you know that?” Ren cinched the bathrobe tighter. It was ineffectual armor against the needling assault Hux was putting forward. But he couldn’t find it in himself to be irritated. Perhaps he had spent his rage quotient for the day destroying the hovercar. He ran his finger over the shard still embedded in his flesh.

“Snoke has eyes and ears in many places.”

“And you’re another set, huh?” 

Hux shook his head, not a single hair falling out of place. “I didn’t come here to spy for Snoke.”

“Yeah?” Ren said. “Why, exactly, _did_ you come here?”

“I was curious.” 

“About me?” Ren saw Hux’s gaze traveling over and over his body, his hands. Searching for signs of danger. “Or about what I would do?”

“What would you do?”

“That depends,” said Ren.

“On?”

“What you do. Replicants are either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit it’s not my problem.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Hux said.

“Sure.”

“Have you ever retired a human by mistake?”

Ren paused. “No.”

“How do you know?” asked Hux, taking a deep and shaky breath that Ren could hear from where he stood by the kitchen.

“I know what the Earthside domestic and labor models look like.”

“You haven’t seen _these_ models,” Hux said, the barest hint of an impish smile on his lips. “The ones who came here from offworld.”

“Not before I was briefed, no.”

“Then you don’t know all of them.”

“You can smoke if you want,” Ren said, dodging.

“I didn’t bring my cigarettes,” Hux said, putting his finger up to the corner of his mouth again. “Do you have any?”

Ren shook his head. “Do you like scotch?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me get you a glass. It can be an experience for a first-timer.”

“Maybe later, Mr. Ren. I want to show you something.” Hux pulled a miniature holopad from his pocket. With a few swipes and taps, a super high-res image rose up. In the picture, a small red-haired boy sat alongside a blonde woman on a porch with white pillars. It was a green place—not in the city and probably not in the state. 

“Look,” Hux said. “It’s me. With my mother.”

“Sure,” Ren said.

“This is my sister,” Hux continued, scrolling through the images. He was frowning, trying and failing to concentrate on the slideshow between glances at Ren. “Our dog. The piano.”

“Yeah,” said Ren. “You remember that time you snuck into the abandoned house? Your sister fell through the floorboards and broke her leg and you begged her not to tell your parents what really happened?”

Hux sat silent. Ren could see his jaw clenching and unclenching.

“How about the time you hatched doves at school? Yours had a white head and a black ring around its neck. You let them go on the front lawn, and a hawk came out of a tree—”

“And ate my dove. Right out of the air,” Hux finished.

“Memories,” Ren said. “Implants. They’re not yours. They belong to Snoke’s nephew.” He ducked as Hux hurled the holopad past his head. It cracked against the window and fell to the dusty baseboards. “All right, all right,” said Ren. “Bad joke. You’re not a replicant.”

Hux sneered.

“Let me get you that drink.” Ren returned from the kitchen with two highballs in hand just in time to see Hux leaving, closing the door behind him. “Fuck,” he whispered.

The holopad’s face was shattered when he picked it up. Chunks of glas skittered across the floor, under furniture. Ren sighed. His knuckles ached. He hit the button but the thing was thumb-locked. He tossed it onto the chair.

Lying in bed after hours of staring at the blank vidscreen and trying to put Hux’s face—his _many_ faces—in it, Ren at last tumbled into an uneasy sleep. There, again, was the snowy wood, the red sword. 

When he pulled it up before his face this time, through the crackling glow he could see Hux’s quavering outline. But it was too late. He had already swung. With a look of milder-than-warranted betrayal, Hux slid apart, his eyes going dark, red hair flaming and falling.

There would be no more sleep that night.

***

Unsure as to exactly why he did it, Ren went back to McGill Street the following afternoon. The door of apartment R-two was hanging open, just as he and Phasma had left it. Watery half-light trickled in through filth-splashed windows, casualties of the endless dirty rain. 

He scoured the corners, ran along the baseboards with his glowtorch. While prying into the sagging and porous wood below the place where he assumed a sink used to rest, Ren saw something flash momentarily. It took two more passes with the torch to catch the glimmer again, but when he did he saw a tiny square of metal half-embedded between two of the boards. He crouched beside the destroyed wood. Using a fingernail, he pried the thing up until it lay flat. It was so small he could pick it up with a fingertip, but it didn’t take too much examination to see that it wasn’t just an odd shard or flake of paint. Tiny circuits in cubist patterns flickered across its surface.

Knees crackling, Ren stood up and pulled a gum wrapper out of his pocket, using it to wrap the chip.

He turned the collar of his trench coat up and walked down the hall and out into the drizzle. A few blocks from where Chao kept his noodle stand (that wasn’t a bad idea for a lunch stop) was the municipal droid repair office. If this Han Solo dealt in droids, chances were good that his clean-up had not been as thorough as he would have liked once he vacated the McGill Street apartment.

When Ren walked into the door scrubbing the rainwater out of his hair, an old-fashioned bell on a string jangled. The man standing at the counter looked up, something akin to starstruck shock on his face. 

“Oh, goodness,” he said. “What can I do for you, officer?”

“That obvious, huh?” Ren asked.

The man took off his magnifying goggles, revealing a pleasant—if ordinary—face. “That’s not what I meant, I mean…”

“It’s fine. Are you Ziff?”

“That I am.” The man gave a small flourish with his hand as if introducing a member of royalty.

“Good,” Ren said, pulling the gum wrapper from his pocket and opening it on the faded plastiresin countertop. “Can you tell me what that is?”

Ziff’s eyebrows drew in and downward. He frowned. “It appears to be a microprocessor.”

“No shit. What I mean is, where is it from? Who _made_ it?”

Rubbing calloused fingers together hard enough to make a whispering noise, Ziff re-adjusted his goggles and peered down at the chip. “It’s from a droid, that’s for sure.”

“Good. And?”

Ziff clicked the tab on the frame of his goggles once, twice. His eye swam in the glass, jerking and jumping. “This serial number is odd. It’s not one I recognize.”

“Okay,” said Ren, struggling to keep his patience. “What else?”

“Let me look it up,” said Ziff. He flipped up the lens on one of the eyepieces and picked up his government-issue—that is to say: probably two iterations behind—holopad and traced over its screen a few times with fingers as surprisingly nimble as they were thick. “Well, the first fourteen numbers signify that this is a working droid, but the last four numbers aren’t anything I’ve seen. I’m guessing this is an offworld product.”

“You’re _guessing_?”

If it was possible for Ziff’s brow to furrow more deeply, it did. “No, I’m sure. Ninety-nine percent sure. This is not a droid built for use on this planet.”

“So, illegal to have here?”

Ziff nodded.

“Could anyone ever import one of these things legally? For any reason?”

“Hm,” said Ziff, tapping his bottom lip. “Well, you could always check with Wollivan. Some guys here do repairs for him on the side, not that they’re supposed to, but I’m sure you know city government work doesn’t pay much.”

“Who’s Wollivan?”

“He has a droid revue down in sector seven. Has a lot of exotics.”

“Exotic droids?”

Ziff blushed. “And, uh...women.”

Ren nodded. “I’ll check with him.”

***

Late lunch at Chao’s killed enough time that the first happy hour crowds might be trickling into Wollivan’s Droid Circus, so Ren headed down to sector seven. It was a five-block cluster of seedy bars and clubs. Rumor had it you could buy anything there—male, female, old, young. Even artificial. Ren had been called to a possible replicant sighting in seven once, only to find that the call had been made by an irate wife on a husband who was over-utilizing a sexdroid (and a poorly made one, at that). Ren had shot the monstrosity anyway, watching over the laments of the husband as the thing twitched and jittered in its death throes, rubber phallus waving.

It was no dolled-up weekend night crowd in Wollivan’s. Most of them men, most of them in drab suits or plain black coveralls, sidling up to the long and sinuous bar for a drink and a look down the bartenders’ shirts. The disco ball above the stage was already spinning but still unlit. When the spotlight hit it and flecks of light began to whirl around the room, most of the occupants cheered.

A thumping bass line started up, overlaid by winding electronic wails. As Ren watched, a young woman in a skin-tight black-and-white catsuit emerged from the curtains at the back of the stage. She was carrying a microdroid, no larger than the palm of her hand. The music changed over to an eerie sort of lament, the spot on the disco ball going red. The woman balanced the droid on one finger, then rolled it along her shoulders, down her spine, across her leg to the point of her toe in a hypnotic, acrobatic dance.

“Get naked!” someone in the crowd shouted.

Ren turned away from the stage. He beckoned a bartender closer. “I need to talk to Wollivan.”

With a sour expression on her face, the girl pointed down the bar. A man in a feather-adorned fedora sat smoking a cigar that seemed almost as large as he was. Wollivan couldn’t have been more than three feet tall, sitting on the bar stool, his little legs in their custom-made faux-alligator shoes kicking. A round-featured blonde had her arm draped over his diminutive shoulder and was whispering in his ear.

The performance on stage ended to scattered, unenthusiastic applause, and the dancer came down to the main floor, taking a seat next to Wollivan. He didn’t touch or look at her.

“Next time, do it in the g-string,” Ren heard Wollivan say to the dancer, who had pulled down the hood of her costume to reveal long, dark hair pulled into a knot at the nape of her neck. 

“You own this place?” Ren asked.

Wollivan turned. “What’s it to you?”

“Kylo Ren. Blade runner five-six-oh-one-one. I need to talk to you.”

“I don’t employ skin-jobs, pal. All my girls are real.” He gave the blonde one a pinch on the rear, causing her to squeal.

“I’m not talking about your girls. I’m here about the droids. You have some that are offworld-make. That microdroid for example.”

“I have a license to import these things for entertainment purposes,” Wollivan said, pausing to take a drag on his stogie. “You want to see my papers?”

“Has anyone ever tried to sell you an illegal droid?” Ren asked. 

“No,” he spat. “Look, buddy, my shop is in order.”

Ren grabbed him by his tiny lapels. “Good. Because if I ever find out you’re running under the radar, this whole thing shuts down. For good.”

Wollivan raised an eyebrow, then motioned the bartender over with an infant-small hand. “Get this man a drink. He looks parched.”

“No,” Ren said. “I’m fine. If you get wind of anything, you make sure to call me first.”

“Absolutely, pal.”

Ren walked away from the bar and into an alcove the wall of which partially blocked the sound of the skittering electronic notes from the DJ booth. He pulled up the Snoke Corporation number on his wristcomm. The attractive secretary answered again.

“Mr. Ren.”

“Let me talk to Hux.”

He hesitated for a moment, but then connected the call. 

“Hello?” Hux was wearing a v-neck shirt, exposing a triangle of pale, freckled skin below the notch of his collarbones. His hair, rather than being coiffed, fell over his forehead, brushing his pale lashes.

Ren was struck dumb.

Hux broke the long silence. “Mr. Ren. What do you want?” It was a clipped response, belying his relaxed look.

“I’m over here at a bar in sector seven. Why don’t you come and have a drink?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Ren. That’s not my kind of place.”

Ren started to say something more, though he wasn’t exactly sure what would come out of his mouth, when Hux ended the call. He leaned against the wall of the alcove, trying to shake images from his head. Pale fields of snow. Red sword. Red hair. Falling. Falling.


	7. Los Angeles (Finn)

“They’re onto you.” This was Rey. She and BB8 barged in the door to Solo’s apartment with Finn not far behind, Rey giving Chewie an absent pat on the head. The huge hound got up and growled when Poe walked into the room.

Solo, who was fooling with a jury-rigged holopad, turned halfway in his chair and smirked. “This your other friend? Remind me to thank Maz for sending you my way.”

“I’m sorry,” Finn said. Poe, for his part, said nothing, but his face hadn’t stopped swelling, either. 

Chewie barked.

“Calm down, boy,” Solo said, standing up and depositing the holopad on a beat-up metal desk. “Start from the—” he began, but then got a good look at Poe. “Whoa, buddy. Somebody worked you over good.”

Finn gritted his teeth. 

Poe nodded.

“To get to them?” Solo asked, waving a hand toward Rey and Finn. 

Another nod. 

“Color me shocked. Blade runners are all assholes.”

“For people like us, yeah, I guess,” Finn said.

“No, I’m serious. Comes with the package. Trust me. I used to be one.”

All occupants of the room who had jaws let them drop (except for Poe, for whom it still hurt too much). BB8 offered up a long, inquisitive note.

“What do you mean, ‘used to be?’” Rey asked, her stance suddenly tense, one foot in front of the other.

“Relax, kid,” Solo said with a bittersweet smile. “I haven’t been in that business for years. And as you might be able to tell from my friends here,” he gestured to the golden humanoid droid and the small one on wheels, “I don’t exactly keep to the letter of the law anymore.”

“What happened?” Finn asked. His heart was racing. 

Solo gave a mirthless laugh. “What always happens. I fell in love.”

“With a _replicant_?” asked Rey.

“No.” Solo sniffed and shook his head. “But it’s a stupid idea in any case. Try not to do it.”

“I don’t think we have time,” Rey said.

“Still, never say never, kid.”

“No,” Finn said. “I think she means we don’t have time to sit here and talk. They know your name and they’re not giving up.”

His expression turning grave, Solo nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I’ve got some safeguards in place, but I’m not ruling anything out with these people. Luckily for you, I have a contingency plan.”

“Somewhere else to go?” Rey asked. She scratched Chewie behind the ears as he rubbed his muzzle against her knee.

“Yep,” he picked up the holopad. “We’re going to see my ex-wife.”

***

Leaving Solo’s two droids and the dog behind, they all piled as best they could into the car by the curb at the Continental. BB8 ended up perched on Finn’s lap—to what appeared to be his tweeting, burbling joy and Finn’s utter discomfort.

Poe mumbled something from the passenger seat of the car.

“Listen, man,” Solo said. “I’m sorry that happened to you, but I can’t understand a thing you’re saying.”

Rey piped up. “He says, ‘Won’t they be able to track this car?’”

Solo laughed. “It’s registered under one of my aliases. This isn’t my first rodeo. What, you think ‘Han Solo’ is my real name?”

All three replicants said nothing.

The drive was long, punctuated only by an occasional coo from BB8. The city streets turned into post-suburban wasteland, still lashed by rain but now only churning up mud puddles from the dust where lawns used to grow. Half of the houses had already caved in, and the other half were well on their way to complete dilapidation. Here, though, the smog of the city had cleared somewhat. Looking through the back window, Finn could see its shreds and billows over the perpetually lit towers, intermittent flares pulsing red lightning within it. 

“From here she’s almost beautiful,” Solo said, glancing back at Finn. “Don’t let her fool you, though.”

“We’re not fooled,” Finn said.

They pulled into a cul-de-sac, Solo swinging the car around a curve to stop in front of a sagging house that only looked duller because it had been painted gray, presumably, before being abandoned.

“Your ex-wife lives here?” Rey asked, her brows drawn in.

Solo shut off the car. “Sorta, yeah.”

BB8 thumped off of Finn’s thighs and the blood began to rush back into his legs, making him wince. He limped out of the car to join the others. Solo walked up the stairs to the dangerously spongy-looking boards of the porch. The door was unlocked, and he beckoned the others to follow him. Inside the house, filigree-pattern paper was peeling from the sheetrock, winding into sad furrows on the cracked wood floor. An old chandelier, turned black by time and the elements, swung on a breeze no one could feel or hear.

They moved through the entry hall to a door below the decimated remains of a spiral staircase. Solo pried open the creaking wood to reveal a metal plate. 

“Dammit,” he said. “I can never find this thing.” He raised a hand and pressed it in a couple of different spots on the blank metal wall until a black glass panel concealed within it lit up green. It flashed with the word _Verified_. “Good. We’re in.”

Instead of sliding upward or away, the door canted on hinges in the floor and lowered inward like a drawbridge. 

Finn looked to his compatriots and saw identical wonder on their faces. 

“Watch your step,” Solo said, and as they followed him into the chamber beyond they could see why. The door had bridged a narrow but deep chasm, lined in sleek metal tiles, that descended into obscurity below. BB8, unconcerned, rolled to the side and peered over, giving an impressed hum. 

“Be careful,” Rey said to him. 

They advanced onto a circular platform, Finn’s heart still hammering even after he’d made it over the bridge. Solo hit a button on the side wall and a hydraulic hiss filled the chamber, the floor vibrating beneath their feet before beginning a lurching descent.

Solo turned toward the back and, still puzzled, all of them followed his lead. After a few moments, a sliver of intense light appeared near their feet and rose to bathe them all in a blue-white glow. 

Finn put his hand up in front of his face until his eyes adjusted to the brightness. What he saw when they did were a mass of holostations, people in various forms of dress—from jeans and sweatshirts to suits and heels—converging on them, then breaking away again to move to another area of the huge room. A discomfited Finn was put in mind of the mining pit back on Sigma 1-M, and he looked down at his feet.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Solo said. “Welcome to the Resistance.”

“Well, well. Han Solo,” came a voice from their left. A young man in khakis and a henley shirt unbuttoned over a thatch of chest hair walked over to the group. 

“Hey, Wexley,” Solo said, giving the guy a hug. “I want you to meet a few people.” He gestured behind him at the awed replicants. “This is Finn, Rey, Poe, and that’s BB8.”

Wexley frowned. “We’ve got a medic that specializes in synthskin,” he said, looking at Poe. 

“How do you know—?” Finn began.

“There are a lot of things you’re going to find out in a short amount of time, kid,” Solo said. “Just stick with me and you’ll be okay.”

Finn nodded.

“Wex, where’s boss lady?” said Solo.

Wexley laughed. “At the main comm.” He looked over at Poe. “I can understand if you don’t want to come with me right now, but I can send our medic over if you’d like.”

Poe hesitated just a moment, then shook his head.

“Come with me, kids,” Solo said, and started off across the floor with a purposeful stride. Eyes peering at holostations were raised once or twice to glance at Poe’s injuries, but no one else in the room paid them much heed, even with BB8 warbling excitedly in their wake.

What Wexley had said was the main station was a horseshoe-shaped console at which several people sat, engaged in quiet conversations not over far-comm but via old-fashioned bandwidth networks. A petite woman with an elaborate updo rounded the back of the station and stopped, tapping one taller young woman on the shoulder. The young woman, who had curly black hair, stood up and followed her.

The short woman smiled—though there was something else within the smile—at Solo. “Rick,” she said.

Solo shook his head. “That’s not my name anymore.”

“Well, whatever you’re going by these days. I can’t keep up.”

“Leia,” Solo said. “This is Finn. Those two are Rey and Poe.”

“I’ve seen your models before, though we haven’t had any for a long time. It’s hard to get here from the farther mining worlds.”

Finn could only blink his confusion.

“It was,” Rey said.

The woman that Solo had called Leia gestured to the taller woman beside her. “This is Jess. Well, a JS model, if you want to be pedantic about it. She came from an offworld resort.”

Finn stepped forward, then hesitated. “Uh...pleasure model?”

Jess smiled. “Thanks, but no. Domestic.”

“People like to be surrounded by pretty things,” Leia said, an unmistakable steely edge of bitterness in her voice.

“So, you’re like a home for stray replicants?” Rey asked.

Leia tossed her head back and laughed. Her hairstyle didn’t even quiver. “Nothing so derogatory. What we truly are is part of a network that seeks reintegration of replicants into society here on Earth. Not as servants but as full citizens.”

Poe gave a strangled interpretation of a laugh.

“Yes,” said Leia, “we understand there’s a long way to go. But we can’t sit idly by while generations of human beings expire one after the other simply because they were engineered.”

“Well,” Rey said, perking up, “that’s part of why we’re here. On Earth, I mean. BB8, why don’t you show them your file?”

The droid chirped and rolled into the center of the circle. The hatch opened on his side and the holoprojector emerged, its image blossoming in the air above the comms console. All of the seated people stood, their faces lit with shifting patterns as the blue helices commenced their gentle rotation.

“Enhance thirty-four to forty-six,” Rey said. It was a whisper.

Pink suffused the blue. Leia walked over to the display and peered at it. “I can have our geneticist look at this.”

“It’s not complete,” Rey said. “We think BB8 was damaged in whatever mishap brought him to us.”

Leia shot a sour look toward Solo. “You didn’t at least _try_?”

Solo held up his hands, a capitulation. “I didn’t really have time, what with the running around and the daring escapes.” Rey glared at him. “Theirs,” he clarified. “Not mine.”

“No offense, but what are you talking about?” Finn asked Leia.

“Well, Mr. ‘Han Solo’ here repairs droids,” Leia said. “I see no reason why he can’t take a crack at this one.”

Solo smiled; it even had a hint of genuineness. “I never said I wouldn’t. Sweetheart.”

“Jess,” Leia said, “why don’t you take our friends here to the med station?” She looked at Poe, who was staring at the floor. “You’ll be fixed right up in no time. They built you to heal faster than we do.”

This time, Poe looked up then nodded once.

***

“That was brave, what you did,” Jess told Poe. “Trying to get into Snoke.”

“Or possibly stupid,” Poe said. He winced at having to talk, though the synthskin menders were hard at work.

“I wish you had met us before you tried.” Jess blushed. “We have a few people—all human, of course—in the hierarchy at Snoke.”

“ _Really_?” asked Rey. “How long have they been there?”

“At least as long as I’ve been here.”

“And how long is that?” Finn asked. “I don’t want to ask if it’s a personal subject.”

“Two years,” she said. “And one on the resort planet. I’m—uh, on the way out.”

“Don’t say that,” Rey said. She interlaced her fingers and held them in her lap, knuckles going white.

Finn nodded. “If we succeed, if there really is a way to reverse-engineer us with a longer lifespan, you won’t—”

Jess only shook her head. “I just want to have done something that matters before I go.”

“What _do_ you do here?” Poe asked, wincing again.

At this, she brightened. “Mostly communications with the East Coast.”

Finn tilted his head.

“Oh,” said Jess. “The Resistance is a nationwide movement. Leia’s brother Luke runs the faction out of New York. We keep tabs on all the blade runners, thanks in part to Han. Well,” she said, a blush rising again, looking at Poe, “we know who they are. Not what they’re doing, really.”

Poe attempted—and failed at—a smile. “It’s okay.”

Rey stood up, now wringing her hands. “Can you show us what you have on the blade runners in L.A.?”

“Sure,” said Jess. “Follow me.”

She led them to a holostation just beyond the temporary wall that blocked off the medical bay. A few flicks of her fingers and a file cropped up on the slender holoscreen. “This is Hald. The one you shot.”

Poe nodded. “Yeah, I remember. ‘Tell me about your mother.’” His laugh was a brittle thing.

“We have a feeling he’s going to be a long time in recovery,” said Jess. “Which is good, because the only other one operating in the metro area is Phasma.” She swiped over to a picture of the blonde woman Finn had seen on the rooftop of the police headquarters.

“No,” Poe said, scowling through obvious pain. “There was another one. Dark hair. Face...sort of _soft_. Fists not so much.”

“I can go through the files we have on the retired runners,” Jess said.

Poe nodded, though he grew increasingly frustrated as she swiped through picture after picture. The last one wobbled beneath her fingers and stayed onscreen. “He’s not there.”

Finn found himself struggling to recall the face of the man who had chased them. It could have been any or none of them. He put a hand on Poe’s shoulder, and Poe brushed his fingers across it briefly.

Jess frowned. “I suppose it’s possible we missed one. Maybe they brought him in from another city.” She lowered her head, as if afraid of personally disappointing Poe.

“Well,” said Finn. “We know he’s out there.”

***

“We’ve got something… _at long last_ ,” Leia said. 

“It would have taken a whole lot less time if I had my tools at home,” Solo said, the corners of his mouth twisting downward. Still, there was fondness in his eyes.

_Ex-wife_ , Finn thought.

“You’re pretty handy with whatever’s lying around. Admit it,” Leia said.

“I don’t just take whatever’s lying around.”

Rey stepped in. “What did you find?”

“Let me get our geneticist over here and we’ll sort this out,” said Leia. She beckoned a short, balding man with a broad, open face over to their huddle. “This is Dr. Brance.”

Finn stepped forward to shake his hand.

“What a grip,” Brance said. “You truly are a marvel.”

“He says that about each and every one of you,” Leia chided.

“BB8,” Solo said, “why don’t you show ‘em what you’ve got?”

BB8 beeped with unabashed pride and rolled to the center once again. This time the display was an orb three time as big, turning and twining in the stale air above their heads. 

“It’s most definitely a complete genome,” said Brance. “Human, of course, but no doubt artificially engineered. You can see the ‘tails’ or ‘tags’ of useless code that have been added as a sort of personal ‘stamp.’”

“And it was made by Snoke?” Finn asked.

“Oh, most assuredly.”

“What about the pink part?” asked Rey. “The expiration matrix.”

Brance walked underneath the writhing ball and picked out the differently colored portion of the holoprojection with his hand, expanding it between his fingers. “From what I can see, it appears to be modifiable.”

Rey and Poe smiled at each other. 

“I knew it,” Rey said.

“Well, the problem is,” Brance said, “this is not a Nexus-6 genome. Or Nexus-5. It’s either older, which doesn’t make much sense considering the time sensitivity of a dispatch droid, or it’s something entirely new.”

“A new generation?” Rey asked, some of the confidence slipping from her voice.

“It appears so.” Brance looked up at her, closing the zoom of the holoprojection. “However, it doesn’t rule out a modification to your genome. Snoke might be able to make those useless tags useful.”

“It would give you life, and also unbrand you,” Leia said, though she did not smile.

“I doubt someone like Snoke would go for that,” Finn said.

Leia leaned in, the holoprojection trailing over her face in luminescent bars. “He might if we had something he valued.”

“What do you mean?” Rey asked. 

BB8, from his place on the floor, shot up an interrogative beep.

“We don’t just have a genome,” Brance said, beaming. “We have a face.”

“What?” said Finn.

Brance collapsed the representation of the genome, flicked his fingers once or twice, and the head and shoulders of a man rose from the bright singularity. He was not quite sharp-featured, nor soft, with high cheekbones and full lips. 

“The file in this droid says this one’s a prototype,” Solo said. “One of a kind. If Snoke thinks he’s above the law, why wouldn’t he have his special project here on Earth, replicant ban be damned?”

“Like a pet,” Rey said, sneering.

“Like a possibility,” said Leia. “If we can have our moles get word to this man, you could have an ‘in’ like we’ve never had before.”

“It’s a huge gamble on his loyalty to Snoke,” said Finn.

“As Rey said, if he’s not much more than a pet to Snoke, he could be easily swayed.”

Finn looked at the faces around him, then up at the face of the man who might be his last chance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to god there will be smut in the next chapter. Be patient, my children.


	8. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

Riding a desk instead of working a motorcade for a plump paycheck, Ren simmered. The hoops of bladeless circulators on the ceiling tried and failed to push the oppressive wetness out of the air in the police station. 

If this Han Solo character had any aliases, or if that was an alias, it couldn’t be connected to anyone else in the system. They had his DNA profile, sure, but false profiles could be bought on the street just the way people used to sell urine for old-fashioned piss tests. Eldon Snoke didn’t have a monopoly on human genetic engineering.

Ren was digging his short and ragged nails into the meat of his palms when he got a ping on his wristcomm. Mitaka.

“What is it?”

“Touchy today,” Mitaka said. “Look, someone gave your license number. Wants to talk.”

“They say who they were?”

“No, _she_ didn’t.”

Ren took a deep breath, let it slowly out through his nostrils. “Put her through.”

The soft beep of a transfer. “Is this Officer Kylo Ren?”

“Blade runner. Yes.”

“I have information you want,” the woman said.

Ren surveyed his recent memory. The voice sounded familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. “About?”

“I don’t want to say anything over comm.”

“What are you proposing?” he asked.

“Meet me.”

“Why should I?”

“It’s not an ambush, Mr. Ren. I know I have something you want because I heard you say it.”

“Where?” Ren asked, sitting up in his ergo chair.

“There’s an oxygen bar in the fourth sector called Mister Goodbreath. I’ll be the one in red.”

“Fine,” Ren said. He lurched out from behind the desk, holstered his pulse pistol, and set the chair spinning in his wake.

The fourth sector streets were crowded with lunch clients—these would be the ones heading to the upscale oversmog boutique restaurants, not the street carts. No curbside vendors were even visible here. The business district seemed an odd place for someone who wanted an anonymous meeting. Or perhaps that was the point.

He pushed through a crowd of finance types carrying designer visibrellas to the entrance of the bar, the marquee of which was ringed by a slim and minimal line of blue neon. Inside the artificial warmth and dryness of the bar it smelled heavily of new plastic. Not one of the patrons looked up from their breathers to mark his entrance.

“Hey, buddy!” A blue-suited attendant blocked his path. “What can I help you with today?”

Ren looked past the guy’s shoulder and saw a woman in a red jumpsuit and small red fascinator with a demi-veil, her face obscured by the padded curve of her breather. 

“We’ve got a new scent. Or, if you’re a newbie, we’ve got an intro nitro-ox blend you’ve just got to try!”

Ren knocked the guy with his shoulder, trying to walk past. “I’m sitting over there. Put whatever you feel like in it.” He felt a hand on his bicep.

The smile had dropped from the employee’s face. “Pay up front for minutes.”

Ren shook his head and walked over to the automat to buy. Hell if he wasn’t writing this off as a business expense. As he crossed from the machine to his stool by the woman in red, the oxygen hose shuddered, a hidden compressor hissing. He slung his leg over the stool, flipping the trench coat out behind him as he sat.

Without putting his face into the mask, the scent of the pure oxygen still carried outward. It was all Ren could do not to flinch back. It smelled like Hux—just as clean and uncomplicated as the man himself was chimerical. 

“New to this?” It was the same voice that had spoken on his wristcomm.

Ren raised his eyebrows in mild surprise at seeing the face of the dancer who had done the routine with the microdroid at Wollivan’s. “So, Wollivan employs replicants?”

The woman shook her head. “But I know he buys droids from, let’s say, _questionable_ sources.”

“How do you know?”

She sat back from the breather, looking straight at Ren. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“Listen…”

“Bazine,” she said.

“Listen, Bazine, _you_ brought me here. Don’t waste my time.”

“Buy me a drink,” she said, red lips smiling. “Over there.”

Kitty-corner to the oxygen bar was a dark wood-paneled pub called the Wrench and Droid. In its shadowy vestibule, Ren shook the water from his coat onto the warped boards. Bazine unpinned the ornament from her hair and left it, gently, on the rack of holosheets by the door. The place smelled, not unexpectedly, of beer and fry grease. Just as in the oxygen bar, no one there raised a head as Ren and Bazine passed by to a synth-leather booth in the back.

The lone bartender came from behind the counter, hand on her hip. “What can I getcha?”

Bazine beamed. “Let me have a Starkiller. On the rocks.”

“Water,” Ren said, turning again to Bazine. “Who’s your buyer?”

She cast a look around the bar. “I want immunity.”

“What?”

“If you’re taking Wollivan down, I want immunity.”

Ren sighed, distracted by the scent that still seemed to linger on his clothes, his skin. He shook his head to clear it. “Wollivan is a small fish. I’m looking for the guy he buys droids from.”

The bartender returned with their drinks, Bazine’s a frosty blue with rock salt on the rim of the glass.

Bazine fairly pouted. “But you promised you’d take him down.”

“I didn’t promise anything.”

“He treats us like shit. You saw it,” Bazine said, swirling the straw around her cup. Trails of cloudy liquid followed its progress. 

“That’s not my problem,” Ren told her.

“Fine,” she grabbed her clutch from the glas-topped table and stood up. 

“Hey,” he said.

But she was already walking away, adjusting the tight jumpsuit and wobbling on her spike heels.

Ren had no choice but to follow. He slapped a twenty on the table and went back out into the downpour. “Hey.” She was on the corner trying to hail a taxi, waving the red hair ornament. He stepped in front of her and pushed her arm back down to her side. “I’m not doing anything about Wollivan,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t help me.”

Bazine glowered. “Why should I?”

“If I catch or retire a replicant off the back of this information, you could be in for a reward.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred.”

Bazine raised her arm again. A taxi swung to the curb, its treads splashing water on Ren’s boots. “Not enough,” she said, opening the passenger door.

Ren slammed it shut again with his fist. “Fifteen hundred.” The lie was smooth.

“Better,” said Bazine.

The cab driver put down his window, fat raindrops spattering his thick beard. “You getting in or not, lady?”

“Piss off!” Bazine yelled.

Tread rubber screamed as the cab pulled away. 

Ren brushed it off. “Who’s Wollivan’s buyer?”

“My boyfriend. Matt.”

“Let’s go see him.”

***

The cab Bazine successfully hailed this time brought them to a tenement on the edge of sector seven. The place was dressed up with faux balconies of twisting wrought iron, though the windows that looked out on them had plasticboard nailgunned over their rickety frames. In another city, maybe in another time, it would be a place that had hanging baskets of plants Ren would never be able to identify, the shot silver of cobwebs within the iron filigree. 

_Nobody makes synth spiders, Mr. Ren._

“He’s up here,” Bazine said, walking under the building’s portico to a steel door barred with an ancient, rusty tire iron.

When Ren rattled the door, the old metal cratered and split in half. He flung the door open and started to walk inside when he felt Bazine’s hand around his wrist.

“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” she asked.

“Not if I don’t have to.”

“You need him, right?” She tugged on his sleeve.

“Yeah. Okay?”

Looking guileless for the first time since Ren had first seen her, Bazine nodded. 

The interior of the complex smelled strongly of mildew, branching fingers of it from the corners throwing spots across every painted surface. Ren let Bazine lead the way up to the third floor on sturdy linoleum-covered stairs. No creaks or groans to give away their progress.

With a concerned look over her shoulder at Ren, Bazine knocked on an unmarked door. “Matt? Baby? It’s me.”

The doorknob clicked and the door opened only far enough to stretch the metal security chain to its maximum length. As soon as the occupant saw Ren he tried to shut it again, but Ren shoved the muzzle of his pulse pistol through the crack. “Open it,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” said a surprisingly deep voice from the other side of the door. “Gimme a sec.” The security chain rattled under shaking fingers until it came unlatched.

Ren shouldered in, still pointing the gun. The guy standing there could only be described as gangly, wearing a garish orange jumpsuit and thick glasses. Obviously the proxy buying business didn’t generate enough commission to afford even the cheapest streetside corneal implants.

He pushed the glasses up his nose with a practiced, reflexive gesture. “What the hell, Bazine?”

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “He _made_ me.”

“Just who is ‘he?’”

“Kylo Ren. Blade runner.”

Matt frowned. “I’m not a skin-job. Can we put the gun down, please?”

Ren shook his head but did lower the pistol by a few inches.

“What did you do, Bazine?” Matt asked.

“I sold out Wollivan. His droids.”

“You did _what_?”

“It was for us, baby,” Bazine said, talking fast and high. “Listen,this guy thinks your seller is hiding replicants. Right? But if we help get to them, we could end up with fifteen hundred credits. Baby, you could get your surgery!”

“And now I need you to set up a meeting with your supplier,” Ren said.

“Hey, jerkface. If he goes to jail I’m out of a job. So I don’t think so,” said Matt.

“If you don’t, Wollivan’s operation goes down in a raid. You, her, everybody.”

Matt’s jaw dropped, his face a seeming parody of concern though Ren could tell it was genuine. “Wollivan’ll have her killed.”

“And we don’t want that to happen, now, do we?” Ren asked. “So you make an appointment with your vendor.” 

“Fine,” Matt said. “What do I do if he doesn’t answer?”

“Keep trying him until he does.”

Matt took a deep breath and perched, shaky, on the edge of his rickety desk, tapping his wristcomm. It beeped into connection on the second tone. “Hey, yeah, man. So listen, I’ve got a problem I need you to come fix.” Matt took out his ear stud and turned it off so Ren and Bazine could hear the conversation. 

“I’m kinda out of pocket right now,” said the voice on the other end. 

Ren shook his head in Matt’s direction.

“Um, yeah, it’s really urgent. We’ve got, uh, a big contingent coming in from fourth sector and this C-six unit has to work.”

“That the micro?” 

“Yeah,” Matt said. “Bazine’s.”

Ren nodded. _Good._

“When are they coming in?” the voice asked.

“Oh, uh, the weekend.”

Raising the pistol again, Ren nudged Matt’s temple with the muzzle. He sent a sharp look toward Bazine, who bit into her knuckle to keep from making a noise.

“Tonight!” Matt squeezed his eyes shut. “Tonight.”

Another nod from Ren.

The voice on the comm: “Earliest I can do is tomorrow, buddy. Got some family stuff.”

“I—I didn’t think you had a family.” 

“Whether I do or I don’t is none of your goddamn business. Earliest I can do is tomorrow.”

Matt looked up with pleading eyes at Ren, who inclined his chin once.

“Yeah, yeah. Tomorrow is fine,” Matt said. “Where at?”

There was a pause on the line. “Behind Tyrell’s. Like last time.”

“Good, good. Fine. Yeah. Perfect.” 

“Three-fifteen?”

“See you there.” Matt tapped the call away, the breath leaving his lungs in a wheezing gust.

“What’s Tyrell’s?” Ren asked, prodding again with the gun just above Matt’s ear. 

“Please,” Bazine said, clenching and unclenching her fists so rapidly it was almost comical.

“It’s a bar,” said Matt. “Second sector. Please.”

“Can we go now?” Bazine asked.

Ren shook his head and holstered the pistol. He looked over at Matt. “I don’t think so. Just to make sure you don’t try anything, I’m taking her downtown.”

“On what charge?” Matt asked, his voice breaking. 

“Solicitation.”

“That’s bullshit,” Bazine said.

“Of course it is,” said Ren. “Matt, you can come bail her out after we meet with your seller.”

“We?”

“That’s right.” Ren spun Bazine by her shoulders and snapped the magnacuffs on her wrists. 

“But I don’t have bail money!”

“Not my problem.”

***

“Book this one in for tonight,” Ren told the guy at the intake desk. “Solicitation.”

“He’s lying,” Bazine said as she was led away.

“Hey, officer,” Ren called after the uniform. “Her boyfriend comes to get her tomorrow...let her go.”

The last thing he saw of Bazine before she was led down the hallway and out of his view were her bewildered eyes. But he whirled around, fists raised, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Whoa, pal.” Mitaka took a step back, holding his hands palms-out toward Ren. “Don’t kill the messenger.”

“What?”

“Heard you were booking in some tramp like a beat cop. Had to see it for myself.”

“Well, you missed it,” Ren said, allowing his hands to relax just a little. 

“Did you get a little of that?” Mitaka asked, leering.

“What do you want?” Ren asked.

“Fine, if you don’t want to play along.” Mitaka sniffled, a long snorting roar that typically preceded spitting. “That little skin-job…Hux? Went AWOL from Snoke this morning. Leech called me up to let us know. Can you believe it?”

Ren felt the breath catch in his chest. “So what do you want me to do about it?”

“Be on the lookout,” Mitaka said. “Like I know you always are.”

“Yeah,” Ren said. “Right. Listen, I’ve got a line in. Tomorrow. Someone who might have ties to our replicants.”

“Good. I knew you’d pull it off.”

“Don’t get your hopes up yet, Mitaka. It’s not even guaranteed this guy knows where the three of them are.”

“Four of them,” Mitaka said, a slow smile crawling onto his lips. “There are _four_.”

***

When Ren saw that the door to his apartment stood open, he clicked open the magnetic snap on his holster and drew the pulse pistol out. Its rough grip rasped against the synth leather. The hallway was still. In a nearby unit, a leaky tap dripped into its metal basin—three, four, five times. Ren held his breath. He pushed the door open by a few inches and jammed his gun hand into the blackness beyond, finally allowing himself to exhale.

A sliver of artificial light could be seen from the living area. Ren nudged the door with his elbow until he had all of the entryway in his view, then swung the pistol in a 180-degree arc, covering all the corners. He walked heel-to-toe, shuffling forward two to three steps into the hallway, then froze when he heard the whisper of fabric. Soft movement. No footfalls.

Taking breaths in shallow sips, Ren stepped past the chair. The light resolved itself into a roundel: his pendulum lamp, swinging softly. Long, white fingers were pushing the paper shade. Back and forth. Again, again.

_Hux._

“I could have shot you,” Ren said.

Hux was sitting in the wing chair, the sharp lines of his clothing crumpled now in his attitude of repose. _Of defeat?_ “Who’s to say you won’t?”

Ren held the gun pointed upward toward the ceiling, then lowered it to the entryway table, where it gave a brief rattle and fell still. “How did you get in here?”

Hux pursed his lips and shook his head. “I bypassed the retscanner.”

“Got any more tricks I don’t know about?”

“I have whatever Snoke gave me,” Hux said. “I suspect he implanted memories in me that are not from his nephew. Probably for his own amusement.”

“Can I take off my coat?”

“It’s your home, Mr. Ren,” Hux said.

Ren slid the wet coat from his shoulders and let it drop to the floor, then unbuckled his shoulder holster and shrugged out of it, tilting his head side to side, the vertebrae crackling. “If I offer you a drink, are you going to leave again?” he asked.

“I have nowhere to go.”

After hesitating just a moment, Ren nodded. Hux resumed tapping the lampshade, as if making a point not to watch Ren as he moved toward the kitchen. Ren took down two highball glasses again, dispensing one cube of ice into each. He poured two fingers for Hux and four for himself, only just remembering to breathe as he re-entered the living room. “Here.”

“Thank you,” Hux said, taking the glass.

“Let the ice melt a little bit,” Ren told him. 

Hux cocked a defiant eyebrow and sipped from the glass, his face betraying no indication of like or dislike.

“Good?” Ren asked.

His only answer was another sip. 

“Good.” He took a slug of his own whiskey, the alcohol stinging his lips. “Why did you run?”

“As it turned out, I suppose I was more of a pet than I’d thought.” Hux slid two fingertips between the high collar of his shirt and his neck, leaving his nails resting against the hollow of his throat.

“Did Snoke...do anything to you?”

“Don’t be crude, Mr. Ren. He asked after me. Where I had been. And I found that this time, unlike so many other times, I didn’t want to tell him. That’s all.”

“That’s all, huh?” Ren said. “Mind if I sit?” He gestured to the battered sofa across from the wing chair.

“Why did _you_?” Hux asked when he was settled.

“Why did I what?”

Hux leaned forward, elbows on his knees, holding the whiskey glass between both palms. “Run. Why did you stop being what you were?”

“Got tired of it, I guess,” Ren said.

“But you were good at it. People don’t typically quit something they’re good at.”

“The pay was shit. And the people were shittier.”

Hux gave a slight smile. “The people you worked with, or the people you killed?”

Ren scrubbed a hand over his face. “Both.” He tossed back the remainder of the whiskey, the rounded edges of the ice tapping his upper lip. 

“If I ran—” Hux started.

“What?” Ren put the glass down on the cushion beside him.

Hux drained the rest of his own glass, this time grimacing just a little. “If I ran, if I went away. Would you come after me? Shoot me?” 

Ren tried to look away, but Hux held his gaze for long, silent moments. “No."

“Why not?”

A pause. “Let me get you another drink.” Ren rose, sending the cup and ice spilling over the couch. He let it lie, but reached over and took Hux’s empty glass from those pale hands. The ice cube’s rattle was jarring in the breath-filled silence of the room. 

In the kitchen, Ren braced his hands on the counter, eyes closed. Blood pounded in his ears, whirring. He was afraid to go back out. He was afraid to go back out and see Hux gone.

Then...music. Soft notes but recognizable.

Hux sat at the piano bench, hands folded in his lap.

“I thought I heard you…” Ren said.

“I didn’t know if I could play,” said Hux. “Of course I remember lessons, but those were probably from Snoke’s nephew. I don’t know.”

“Try it again.”

Hux looked up at him.

“Please.”

The melody was simple, harmonies weaving in and out again as pallid fingers pressed the keys. “You kept it tuned,” Hux said.

“It’s beautiful,” Ren told him. 

Hux let his hands drift off of the keyboard, falling folded in his lap once again. “I’m not sure you know what beautiful is, Mr. Ren.”

“I think I do.”

Avoiding Ren's gaze, breathing heavily now as if the playing had been an undue exertion, Hux stood and went to collect his coat from the arm of the wing chair. “I should go.”

“Where are you going to go?” Ren asked.

“I don’t know.” He crossed the living room, dodging Ren.

“You said you had nowhere.”

Now in the entry hall, Hux stepped over Ren’s coat.

Ren pushed past him and slammed the door with a brutal echoing crunch.

“Don’t try to make me stay, Mr. Ren.”

“You want to stay. That’s why you’re going.”

“You don’t know anything about what I want.”

Ren gripped Hux’s throat and slammed him against the wall opposite the door. 

Green eyes were wide; Ren relaxed his grip, but only by a little. “You want to kiss me.”

Hux shook his head.

Ren slapped his cheek. “Say it. Say, ‘kiss me.’”

“I don’t think I can rely on—”

Another slap. “Say, ‘kiss me.’”

Hux, his cheeks aflame, bared his teeth.

“Do it!”

“Kiss me,” he hissed.

Ren let his fingers loosen. He moved in and pressed his lips to Hux’s. “Again.”

“Kiss me.” This time Hux opened to the kiss and Ren slipped his tongue inside Hux’s mouth. He was warm and tasted of whiskey.

When they broke, Ren kissed his cheeks, his chin, curled his fingers in his red hair. He felt the styling gel crackle and give out. “Say, ‘I want you,’” he whispered against white skin.

“I want you.” It was also a whisper, breath tickling Ren’s ear.

Ren grasped Hux’s wrist and led him away from the door, down the hall, through the living room to the bedroom. Hux gave no verbal or physical protest.

When they reached the threshold, Ren turned and pressed his mouth to Hux’s once again, pulling the man to him, tracing the lines of his stiff collar. “Take it off.”

Hux narrowed his eyes but obeyed, unbuttoning the shirt and casting it away. 

The clean scent of him permeated the room, giving Ren a vertiginous rush. “And those,” he said.

Hux unfastened and kicked away his trousers, leaving only black silk briefs.

Ren pulled Hux against him by the nape of the neck, bringing one hand down to cup him, only to find him soft. “Are you afraid?” he asked.

“No.”

Ren fell to one knee and pressed his nose into the join of Hux’s thigh. He tugged at the waistband of the briefs and mouthed at his cock through the silk. 

At last, Hux gave a soft sigh, and Ren pulled the fabric away, taking Hux in his mouth. Gentle fingers wove through his hair as he sucked him to hardness, stopping only when Hux had begun to move his hips in shallow pulses.

Ren wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and stood, unbuttoning his own shirt and shedding his trousers. Hux stood pink and white and utterly unashamed before him. Ren’s own erection was aching. 

Hux turned and bent over the edge of the bed.

“No, no,” Ren said. “No, I want to see your face.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled Hux to straddle his thighs, the breath hitching in both of their chests as skin contacted skin. The last of the hair gel gave way to flaking ruin as Ren hauled back on Hux’s head to get at his throat.

Hux, in turn, scrabbled for purchase with his nails in Ren’s flesh, scratching long, red lines down his biceps. 

Ren brought them both to the bed in tangled, messy kisses, Hux’s long fingers now in Ren’s hair as well. Pulling, pushing. Wanting and distancing and returning again. He lay a hand on Hux’s sternum and guided him to lay back against the bedcovers. 

“Need you,” said Hux, uninhibited now.

“Yes,” said Ren. He kissed across Hux’s collarbone, down his chest and belly, and closed his mouth over Hux’s cock once again. 

“Oh, yes,” said Hux.

Ren used mouth and throat to draw gasps from Hux’s lips, reaching below with moistened fingertips to stroke him. 

“Stop,” Hux said.

Ren hummed and shook his head.

“ _Please_. I’m going to—” He gripped Ren’s hair.

The sweet-sour taste of him blossomed on Ren’s tongue as Hux came, his body shuddering.

Ren swallowed smoothly, pinning Hux’s hips to the bed with large hands. He pressed a kiss to the sensitive inside of Hux’s thigh before reaching over to the bedside table. “Want to be inside you.”

Hux nodded.

The lubricant was cool over Ren’s fingers, and he warmed it between them before slipping two into Hux’s pleasure-relaxed body. 

Hux cried out, back arching and hands scraping at the headboard. 

Ren worked his fingers in long strokes, pressing in to the knuckle before withdrawing again. “Say it,” Ren breathed against the skin of his belly, the dusting of strawberry hair there.

“Please—”

“I want to hear you say it.”

Hux reached down and knotted his fingers in Ren’s hair, pulling him up with cruel force. “Fuck me.”

Ren withdrew his fingers and drizzled the lubricant over his palm, stroking his cock. 

“Come on, dammit,” said Hux.

Ren pushed Hux’s thighs toward the headboard and guided his cock. Hux’s body had little resistance left in it and Ren slid in flush in one smooth thrust. He sighed, then braced himself with hands beside Hux’s shoulders and began to pump his hips.

Hux wrapped his long legs around Ren’s waist and breathed soft curses into the air above the bed.

Ren tucked his head into the crook of Hux’s neck, but Hux pushed him upward.

“No, I want to see your face.”

“I’m close,” Ren said.

“Come inside me, Ren.”

“Kylo,” Ren said.

The air was thick to the point of choking around him.

“Kylo,” said Hux, and Ren was coming, slamming his hipbones against Hux’s thighs and shouting through gritted teeth. 

Ren slipped free and rolled to his side, looking toward the wall. 

Hux turned and draped his arm over Ren’s back. 

“Stay,” Ren said.

“I will.”

“I can’t protect you if you don’t.”


	9. Los Angeles and Environs (Han Solo)

The kid—the girl—was still looking at him like he’d shot her dog or something. She was so young. They all were. But of course she wasn’t, comparatively. Oldest of them all. Closest to expiration.

Han wished he had a drink. He’d drink himself blind after every “retirement” back in the old life. It was especially bad if it was a woman. _Looked like one,_ he used to remind himself. Regret was a beast to be confronted daily; kept at bay sometimes but never slain. 

You kill enough, regret is the one thing you can’t exterminate.

Han had once retired one who looked like Jess. One of the first Nexus-6 models. It— _she_ —had ended up working for some mobster doing menial chores (quite possibly some she objected to), but he guessed it was more comforting to her than shipping offworld to a new household or a resort planet. She hadn’t fought back. Some of them do, some don’t. It was the howling mafia man he’d arrested who put up the biggest stink.

_That was my property! This is America! You can’t just come in and take a man’s private property!_

More than two hundred years and the country had gone back almost to where it had started. That’s what Leia used to say as they lay together on the busted mattress in the trash heap apartment he picked up after quitting the police force. 

“What is it, kid?” he asked Rey.

She only shook her head, looked away. 

Han got up and walked over to the main comm desk, feeling like a fifth wheel. “What’s the situation?” he asked Leia.

“Waiting for word from our mole on whether he can get to the Nexus inside Snoke.” She was tapping a holopad stylus against her top lip. 

Thirty years on and god _damn_ if she wasn’t still beautiful. Han felt like he was sagging in all the wrong places, but Leia…

“Leia, ma’am,” Jess piped up. “We have Snoke One on comm.”

“Put him through.”

The telltale interference of satellite communication popped into being when Jess switched the channel over. It was hard to believe those floating junkyards were still up there, cluttering the upper atmosphere. With the advent of far-comm they’d all but been forgotten by the establishment. Not exactly reliable, but reliably discreet.

“Bastian,” Leia said, “what’s the word?”

Huh. Bastian. The one Snoke employed as a receptionist. Could really only be described as a pretty boy at first glance, but sharp as hell once you got to know him. Not that, Han was sure, he let on to the extent of his smarts in the course of his day job. 

“We’ve got problems,” Bastian said.

“I don’t like problems,” Leia said, chewing the end of the stylus.

“The Nexus-7,” Bastian said. “Hux. He’s gone.”

“What do you mean, ‘he’s gone?’”

“I overheard Leech talking to the police chief. They think Hux is on the run in the city somewhere.”

Leia sighed. “And, of course, that means they’ve got the blade runner after him.”

“Blade _runners_ ,” Han cut in. “Finn, Rey, and Poe say there’s another one out there who’s not in our database.”

Leia’s look was reproachful. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

Han shrugged. “Now you know.”

“Which makes it all the more important that we get a contingent back to the city to find this Hux.”

Han was tempted to ask what good the man could be while running away from Snoke, but that was the old blade runner talking. He massaged his temples with his fingertips. Blade runners tried—hell, were _taught_ —to kill humans only as an absolute last extremity. But anyone harboring replicants was fair game. This time, it had put Han himself in the direct line of fire, not just by proxy through contact with the Resistance.

“What are your orders?” Bastian asked.

“Sit tight,” said Leia. “We’ll let you know if we need you. Out.”

“Out,” said Bastian, and ended the call. 

Sighing, Leia shook her head. “In a way it makes it easier.”

“Easier?” Han said. “How?”

“We don’t have to worry about infiltration. Risking Bastian, who’s in a key position. We just have to get to Hux before the blade runners do.”

Han frowned. “He could be offworld already. As far as we know he’s a one-of-a-kind model. Nobody will suspect.”

“My guess would be he hasn’t been out much,” Leia said. “Not if Snoke wanted to keep him under wraps.”

“So he’s either got help from someone who’s not us,” Han said, “or he’s flailing around lost in the city.”

“I’m banking on the latter, and that’s why I’m sending a contingent out to search.”

Han pulled Leia aside. “I’m going in, too. I have a client meeting. My buyer called yesterday.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Stupid idea.”

“I know.”

“It’s a trap.”

“I know it is.”

“So, what the hell are you doing?” Leia asked, putting a tentative hand on Han’s forearm. 

He gave a half-smile. “I’m buying you time to find this Hux. Take at least one runner out of commission for a while.”

“You never were a hero.” Leia shook her head. 

“I was hero enough for you.”

“Why now?”

“Because there’s an actual chance with this Hux guy.”

Leia punched him hard in the bicep. “I’m a little pissed you didn’t think there was a chance before.”

“You’re always a little pissed,” Han laughed, rubbing his arm. “It’s what makes you good at this.”

“Just…” she bit her lip. “Be careful.”

He nodded. “I’ll keep you posted.”

“You know,” she said to his retreating back, “as many times as you did it I never could stand to see you walk away.”

Han turned a final time, giving her a half-smile and a salute. “Don’t watch.”

***

Finn snagged him while he was shrugging on his leather jacket in the commissary. “Where are you going?”

“Back,” Han said.

“We’re coming with you.” Poe stepped up beside Finn, blocking the path toward the main exit.

“The hell you are. I just risked my hide to get you out here. I’m not throwing you back into the fire, whether you want me to or not.”

“Who are you sending to look for Hux?” Finn asked.

“I don’t know. People.” Han tried to shove past but Rey stepped up, shoulder-to-shoulder with Poe.

“That’s right,” she said. “ _People._ ”

“What do you mean?” Han asked, skimming a hand over his hair. Their intense gazes unnerved him. 

“Don’t you think he would trust someone more like him?” Finn asked. “Someone who can identify?”

“For all we know, he’s never met another replicant,” said Han.

“All the more reason,” said Rey.

“ _You’re_ risking yourself going back,” Poe said.

“And they have no connection to your place or they would have been there already,” Finn said. “We’re either on the run, or we’re sitting here doing no good.”

“I want to want to have done something that matters before I go,” Poe said. 

Rey smiled at him.

Han shook his head. 

“We’ve got nothing to lose,” Finn said. “Not our lives—nothing. If this is our chance, we had better go for it.”

Han clenched his fists then released them. “Shit.”

“Yes!” Rey clapped her hands.

“Fine, yeah, fine. Let’s just go now so no one sees us leaving the complex.”


	10. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

Hux woke first. From the intent, almost meditative way he stared at the ceiling of Ren’s bedroom, it wasn’t clear that he’d even slept at all. 

Ren turned on his side and placed his sleep-warmed hand on Hux’s chest, but it sparked no reaction. The circulator above the bed clicked on, its breeze moving a lock of Hux’s hair across his forehead. His breathing was gentle and even.

Ren, in turn, held his breath as he raised his hand and traced two fingers over Hux’s lips—from one corner to the other, top and bottom, the cupid’s bow pink and prominent. He slipped his fingertips just beyond the border, touching Hux’s white teeth, which clenched against the invasion. Reversing course, he trailed moisture over Hux’s chin and down his neck to the hollow of his throat. At that, Hux closed his eyes and let his lips part. Ren pushed his fingers past the ridge of Hux’s teeth, pressing on the warmth of his tongue. Hux’s eyelids fluttered as he closed his lips around Ren’s fingers. 

Palm gentle against Hux’s chin, Ren worked slow fingers in and out again, Hux moving his tongue between them then licking the fingerpads, the knuckles. When Hux reached up to grasp Ren’s wrist, though, Ren drew his wetted hand away and slid it below the blanket to wrap around Hux’s half-hard cock. He stiffened quickly in Ren’s grasp. 

“Come here,” Ren said, reaching for Hux, grabbing his bicep. 

Hux swung his leg over Ren’s hips, wincing with pleasure as his erection lay trapped between their bodies. 

Ren kissed Hux’s chin, mouthed along his jawline, licked the tendons of his throat and along his collarbones.

Hux sat back on his heels and curled his hand around Ren’s cock.

Drawing a hissing breath, Ren reached over for the bottle of lubricant and anointed his hand. “Ride my fingers,” he told Hux. 

Hux exhaled and positioned himself, easing down on two of Ren’s fingers. He canted his hips forward and backward, breathing in as he moved upward and out as he pushed down on Ren’s hand.

“Can you take another one?” Ren asked, his voice choked with want.

“Yes.”

Ren slid a third finger into Hux’s body. 

Hux groaned at the sweet stretch, flexing his thigh muscles as he moved.

With his unoccupied hand, Ren slicked himself then withdrew the fingers, gripping Hux’s cock as Hux took him in, sinking down in slow measure. His breathing was rapid, in time with his heartbeat. Hot skin contacted his own, sending his mind reeling. He pressed his spine into the mattress, pushing his hips upward.

Hux cried out then, bracing himself with hands on Ren’s hips. “Kylo,” he said.

“That’s right.” He stroked Hux’s cock with languid movements.

“Please,” Hux said.

Ren quickened his pace, a concession.

Hux’s mouth was open, his cheeks and forehead red with exertion and pleasure, pinpoints of sweat standing out along his hairline. Before long, his ruddy brow furrowed and he ground down against Ren, gasping as he spilled over the taut planes of Ren’s belly. He leaned forward, resting his hands on Ren’s broad chest, and moved his hips, still riding out the last shudders.

Ren gripped Hux’s hips, guiding him. Warm breath tumbled across his face, ruffled his hair. He strained under Hux’s slight weight, thrusting upward. “Come on. Come on.”

His cry was nearly a roar when he came, digging his fingers into Hux’s thighs. 

Hux bent in a graceful arc, pressing himself against Ren’s chest and the cooling fluid there. He lay his cheek against Ren’s shoulder, staying until Ren’s cock grew soft again and slipped free.

***

Sickly red light from a passing dirigible fanned through the blinds on the living room windows. The coat lay where it had been dropped, smelling of dirty rain.

Hux, his hair still wet from the refresher, sat silent as Ren dressed. It would, Ren figured, be beneath him to ask where he was going. He fought the urge to tell Hux again to stay in the apartment. There was already a sizzling energy around Hux, corrupting the cool exterior despite all visible efforts to the contrary. The muscles of his face fretted below their schooled planes. He would not be penned in again, which was the precise situation Ren could see unfolding before him now. 

It was not a wire he walked, but a razor. He would lose Hux, lose these moments. 

_Why did you stop being what you were?_

_I was good at it, yes. But I was so tired, so tired. I_ am _so tired._

“Try to sleep if you can,” Ren said. “I’ll be back.”

Hux only nodded. 

Part of Ren hoped he would return to music. Much of him feared he would return to silence.

***

The front doors of the trellised high rise complex near sector seven were still ajar. Matt answered his apartment door, his complexion white to the point of greenness. He had fastened the stems of his glasses around his head using a bit of raw elastic. 

“I don’t have Bazine’s droid,” he said, a tone of accusation filtering through his residual fear.

“It’s fine. You won’t be there very long.”

“Is she okay?”

Ren didn’t answer.

“I don’t want to die,” Matt said, voice very soft.

Finding he had nothing to say in response, Ren shook his head. It seemed to appease Matt for the moment, though.

Tyrell’s was a solid, working-class joint in the middle of sector two. At around fifteen hundred hours the lunch crowd was finally thinning out, and employees wrapped in dirty aprons were hauling out cellose garbage bags to the hulking megabins in the wide alley that ran behind the back of the building.

It was dusk-dark and moist within the brick canyon as Ren made his way behind the bins, pulse pistol in hand. He had placed a shaking Matt just at the corner of the bar, where a narrow passage led beyond it to the alley. Blind windows looked out from the adjacent building, most of them either boarded or painted over. Mist filtered down in curls from the eaves high above.

The quarter-hour came and went with Ren standing in a puddle of spilled beer, breathing through his mouth in an effort to block out the stench. “Don’t move,” Ren said, transmitting to the earpiece he had given Matt.

“He’s not here, man.”

“Stay there.”

“He’s onto us,” Matt said, a shriek of panic behind the whispered words.

“Shut up.” Ren craned his neck to look around the corner of the bin. Matt stood in the center of the alley, dark spots of sweat breaking out on the back and armpits of his jumpsuit. He tensed so quickly it was a spasm when something rattled by the street in front of the bar.

“Could be him,” Matt said.

“I said shut your mouth.” Ren could hear Matt’s ragged breathing as whatever it was came rumbling down into the alley. Crouching and holding his pulse pistol near his chin, he looked around the edge of the megabin again. Through the window made by Matt’s spraddled and shaking legs Ren could see the filthy white plasteel of a trash pickup droid.

“ _Please excuse me,_ ” came the tinny voice over its neck speaker. “ _Routine refuse pickup. Please excuse me._ ”

Matt looked backward in Ren’s direction so only Ren could see the hatch open in the droid’s side. The _thunk_ of a stun bolt hit Matt in the midriff and he groaned, head splashing into a reservoir of congealing grease. Another two or three bolts ricocheted off the bin’s edge and bounced on the brick of the facing building. Ren tore out his earpiece and crouched lower, then switched the pistol’s setting to stream, hoping if he got in a shot he would be able to fry the droid’s circuits. You can pump a machine full of pulse rounds but unless you hit something necessary they’ll just keep coming. Droids don’t bleed.

Shaking an image of Hux’s face out of his mind, Ren swung around the lip of the bin and fired over Matt’s prone form, the energy beam grazing one of his juddering knees and burning through the cheap nylon of the jumpsuit. It was a direct hit on the droid, though, which whirled like a spun coin and skittered off to hammer against the wall. At first, Ren thought it was debris from the droid’s crash that zipped blazing past his shoulder, but muzzle flash flared again from one of the blacked-out windows on one of the upper floors. He flattened himself against the brick behind the bin and waited for a lull. When no shots came for a few split seconds, he rolled his shoulder around the edge of the bin and fired upward. He had forgotten to take the pistol out of stream mode. The beam heated and burst the black-painted glas, sending smoking shards whistling down into the concrete of the alleyway. 

Ren heard someone behind the window cry out, then saw a flash of movement beside the starburst glass left in the window frame. Ren flipped the gun to pulse, shoved it in the holster, and ran. He had to jump to make the bottom ladder rung of the fire escape, swinging his leg up to catch the bar behind his knee. The metal howled and rattled.

Getting his feet under him at last, Ren dashed up the clattering steps, swinging through the switchbacks to the shattered window. Particles of still-hot glass dug into his palms as he hoisted himself onto the ledge and shimmied inside, rolling as he hit the wooden floor, which protested under his weight. Someone yelled from a nearby window. 

Ren unholstered his gun, the blood on his hands making the grip slide. 

There was a trail of minute blood drops leading out of the apartment and to the left down the hall; he followed their jeweled brightness. In the elevator lobby, a door had only just shut. Ren blasted a good-size hole in the flimsy metal and leapt into the empty space above the elevator. One leg crashed through the top of the car and Ren felt his foot connect with flesh—a face or shoulder.

He hauled himself up using the cable and jumped again, this time falling entirely through the top of the car just as it touched down on the ground floor. Spinning on his heel, he grabbed for the other man’s shirt but it slipped through his bloody fingers.

“Han Solo!” Ren fired a warning shot, leaving a smoking, stinking divot in the linoleum at Solo’s feet.

Arms protecting a face that was already slashed by the window glas, Solo crashed through the door at the front of the building, its scattering shards crunching under his feet.

“Stop!” Ren shouted.

Solo dashed across the street, setting car horns to screaming. He flung open the rotting door of a condemned apartment complex and dashed inside, disappearing into shadow. 

Without breaking stride, Ren barrel-rolled across the hood of one of the cars and followed into the building. An enormous pile of blackened and broken furniture, boards bristling with bent nails, splintered railings filled the entryway. It still smelled of ash; there was a sooty star on the high ceiling where the flames had licked outward. A bonfire interrupted, burning red then put to death.

_Hux._

Ren watched a flailing arm disappear behind the pile. Skirting it himself, he charged up the stairs on Solo’s heels. When he was able to grab Solo’s wrist, flinging him around and sending him skidding into the room, he saw a man who was older and more tired than he expected. Solo’s chest was heaving; he was sweating heavily, his face red. 

“Where are they?” Ren asked, leveling his pistol at Solo’s face.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Solo huffed.

“I’ll find them.”

“You can’t retire a person. They’ll be all over you.”

“I don’t know you’re a person,” Ren said. “Where are they?” He fired past Solo’s head, close enough that the blast ruffled his white hair.

Solo smirked. “Not a very good shot, are you?”

“Tell me where they are. I’m trying to save your life, but I need you to help me.”

Solo backed further into the room. “Sure. Sure.”

“I _will_ shoot. Get on your knees and put your hands behind your head.”

Now standing on the charred spot, Solo’s bootheels cracked the bubbled paint.

“I said, get down on your knees and put your hands behind your head.”

This time, Solo crouched as if he were preparing to kneel, but he leapt up in the air instead, landing with all his weight on the burned section of floor. The crack was more of a sigh as it gave way and he tumbled onto the debris below.

When Ren looked through the hole in the floor, he saw Solo lying face-up, his limbs as jumbled as the broken balustrades and ripped-up parquet underneath him. He was trying to rise, but was prevented from doing so by the jagged spike of half-burned wood that jutted from just below his ribcage.

Ren stamped his foot, sending ash down on Solo’s face. “Fuck!” 

Downstairs, Solo was smiling, his teeth filmed with blood. 

“Tell me where they are.”

“I’ll tell you—” Solo began. He coughed, and a mist of blood leapt up then settled over his skin, running in pink rivulets with his sweat.

Ren grabbed his shoulder, causing him to wince. “Tell me.”

“I’ll tell you something,” said Solo. “Get out of it, kid. Get out before it kills you. Because it will.”

“Where are they?” Ren shouted, shaking Solo by the arm until he coughed great gouts of blood.

With a final gurgle, bubbles of red swelling and popping at his lips, Solo let his head fall back, his mouth hanging slack.

Ren grasped a half-blackened banister support from the rubble underneath Solo’s body and flung it toward the wall. The burned portion exploded in black chunks that scattered and rattled across the floor, some of them skidding to a stop at the soles of Ren’s boots. He stood panting, hands by his sides growing sticky with scabbing blood.

***

The street outside was a carnival, ovoid beads of red and blue light swirling over the faces of the buildings as more and more patrol units set down on the concrete, thrusters hissing. Beat cops swarmed the area, either performing tasks Ren couldn’t identify or milling around intending to look purposeful. As for himself, he stood by the exit, hand fumbling as if for a cigarette though he had never smoked a day in his life.

_Hux._

Mitaka walked outside, his own cigar blazing, just before the hover-med stretcher bearing Solo’s bagged corpse was guided through the double doors. “What a Charlie Foxtrot. You’ve plunged me into a hell of paperwork, Ren.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” Ren said. It would be two holoforms at most. Whereas beat cops were often suspended pending investigation when they discharged their weapon even once, blade runners got special dispensation to keep to their assigned tasks. If they took his weapon away after the three replicants ( _Three. Three._ ) were retired, all the better. He’d pick up a newer model blaster from the security company and keep trucking.

“I take it he didn’t spill anything, or you’d be long gone,” Mitaka said, taking a puff then trying and failing to blow a smoke ring. 

Ren clenched his jaw.

“Any word on our little runaway? The one from Snoke?”

“No.”

“I’ll put Phasma on it.”

“No. I’ve got a steady lead on the three others. Give me a day.”

“You mean the lead that just shipped out in a body bag?” Mitaka asked. “I’m putting Phasma on it.”

Ren exhaled, letting his breath send Mitaka’s cigar smoke billowing off-course. A beat cop scented the smoke and turned for a brief second. “All I need is a holopad and I’ve practically got eyes on our replicants.”

Mitaka clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s okay to ask for a little help. Everybody gets rusty when they’ve been out of it for a while. Right, pal?” He pulled a uniform over by the shoulder. “Hey, let our Detective Ren here borrow your holopad, huh?”

Flustered in the face of authority, the young officer fumbled at his belt. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“I’ll use mine when I get back to the station,” Ren said.

Mitaka gave a slim smile that conveyed no mirth. “You’ll use this one.”

Uncurling his fists with great effort, Ren took the holopad and tapped in, leaving burgundy fingerprints on the glas. “Where do we keep the records on former personnel?”

The cigar nearly dropped out of Mitaka’s mouth. “You think this guy was police?”

_Get out of it, kid._

After a pause, Ren said, “I think he was a runner.”

“Ho-lee shit.” Mitaka grabbed the pad and swiped his stubby fingers across its surface. “Huh.” He handed it back to Ren. 

It had been twenty years since the Tokyo massacre; a lot of blade runners had come through the system. Solo was right; you burned out. Hell, Ren himself had done it. Fielding the acute discomfort of having Mitaka watch over his shoulder, he swiped through the records. Men, women—all grim, unsmiling photographs. He had swiped just past it when a face registered in his memory. Younger, yes, but unmistakably the same man.

“That’s our guy,” Ren said, bringing the image up into three dimensions.

“You sure?” Mitaka asked.

“I’m sure. This says his name was Rick Deckard.” It made sense that nobody recognized him when he was busted a couple years back; he had a solid alias and all his contemporaries had long since retired.

“We’ve got records for him, then,” Mitaka said. “Contacts, place of residence.”

Ren shook his head. “If he was using the same address he’d be an idiot. This man wasn’t stupid.”

“He was dumb enough to get caught.”

“He was expecting me. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

“Yeah, and what was that?”

“Buying time.” Ren turned and began to walk down the street, his boots splashing in the ever-present puddles.

“How the hell do you know?” Mitaka shouted after him.

“Read my report.”

“Where are you going?”

Ren stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Back to the station. If you don’t want this guy to be a dead end, let me do my job.”

***

Unwilling to risk anything getting back to Mitaka, Ren eschewed the offered hoverpatrol escort and took a cab to his high-rise. At least this time the door was shut firm and locked.

Hux wasn’t in the living room. The piano sat silent and vibrating with potentiality, the lamp drooped, motionless and forlorn, above the arm of the wing chair. Ren ducked into the kitchen. He saw a plate scattered with crumbs, delicately balanced on the lip of the sink, but nothing else. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that the hollow banging that seemed to come from the walls around him was the sound of his own hammering heart.

In the bedroom, a motionless form lay beneath the covers, fragile and fetal. The breath stopped in Ren’s throat. His fingers curled into his palms; it was a struggle to free them, shaking, once again.

No movement from the bed. 

The whisper of the carpeting as its fibers crushed under his boots was magnified within the confines of the room. Ren lifted the corner of the dingy white sheet, revealing red hair, pale lashes on pale cheeks. Lips slightly parted. There was breath coming from that mouth when Ren kissed it, relief flooding his muscles and making them loose and uncertain.

Hux opened his eyes. 

“I thought—” Ren started, then squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. Warm fingers encircled his wrist.

“What happened?”

Ren tried to shrug, but winced when Hux used a fingernail to flick at a piece of the window glas embedded in his palm. “Hazards of the job.”

“Don’t do that,” Hux said, gouging at the shard and pulling it out. The laceration began to bleed afresh.

“Ow. Don’t do what?”

“Close yourself off.”

Ren pulled his hand away.

“Did you find your other replicants?” Hux asked.

“No.”

“But you hurt someone.”

“He killed himself.”

“Why?”

“To distract me.”

Hux sat up and cocked his head to the side. “To distract a policeman, one would think you should kill someone else, not yourself. You can’t control what you do after you die.”

Ren sniffed. “Sometimes you can’t control what you do before you die.”

“That’s bullshit,” Hux said, the primness of his tone belying the harsh words. “There’s always a choice.”

“You’re naive. Young.”

“I don’t know how old I am. If experience can be...manufactured.”

“Memories, sure,” Ren said. “Not experience.”

“I want experience,” said Hux. “Make me a drink?”

Ren nodded. “Let me wash my hands.” He stared at his own reflection, seeing for the first time the pink mist that lay across his cheek like a flush—Solo’s ( _Deckard’s?_ ) blood, spewed from his rapidly filling lungs. The cuts opened again and ruddy water swirled down the drain, studded with scabby flakes. 

He gritted his teeth as he picked the remaining shards from his skin. When he looked up, he saw that Hux stood in the doorway with the bottle of scotch in his hand. 

He took a swig, licked his lips. “Hold still.”

Knowing what Hux was doing, Ren nonetheless stood obedient over the sink. He wanted the pain, wanted Hux to be the one to inflict it. As the alcohol poured over his palms, he sucked in a breath between his teeth, letting the sting clear his mind. The fog of fear and failure. Fear _of_ failure.

Hux blotted a little of the liquor onto a towel and used it to wipe down Ren’s cheek. Whiskey and blood. 

Ren heard the towel hit the floor. He hadn’t realized he’d had his eyes closed until he felt the neck of the bottle against his lip. 

“Drink.” Hux tipped some of the liquid into his mouth and he swirled it around, letting it take the sour taste away.

“Thank you.”

“I suppose I should cherish that. I’m guessing you don’t say it very often.”

Ren turned to meet Hux’s unblinking gaze.

“I used your holopad.”

“It’s better if you don’t.”

“I booked a ticket off-world.”

“What?” Ren set the bottle down in the basin of the sink. 

“You heard what I said.”

“Hux...they’ll _use_ you out there. More than Snoke ever did.”

“More than you do?” Hux asked.

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“You can’t.”

“I can if you stay.”

“You know I can’t do that. I didn’t leave one cage to step into another,” Hux said.

Ren picked the towel off the floor and blotted the sluggish blood from his palms. “Mitaka put another blade runner on you.”

“All the more reason for me to leave.”

“Don’t.”

“Then come with me.”

Ren looked at the floor, breathing in then out again.

“You won’t kill me,” Hux said. “You won’t come with me. But you’ll happily stay to kill people just like me.”

“It’s my job.”

“ _Fuck_ your job. You quit before. You ended it. Do it again.”

“I can’t.”

Hux narrowed his eyes. “You don’t want to watch me die.”

“You’re not going to die,” Ren said. He dug his fingertips into the scabbing cuts on his palms.

The vicious backhand came out of nowhere; nothing in Hux’s body had signaled his intent. 

Ren clutched his cheek, blood sliding down his wrist to stain his shirt cuff.

“You’re a coward, Ren.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re a fucking coward.”

“Shut _up_.” Ren grabbed Hux by the hair with a bloody hand, red smearing bright against red. Knuckles digging into the scalp, he twisted Hux’s head to the side, forcing him down to his knees. 

Hux did not raise a hand in protest, only shut his eyes.

Ren shook him by the hair, his neck jerking on his shoulders. “Open your eyes.” With his free hand, Ren unfastened his trousers and pulled out his half-hard cock. He shook Hux’s head again. “Do it.” Faced with hesitation, Ren knotted his fingers further, feeling a few hairs separate from Hux’s scalp.

Hux opened his mouth, looking up at Ren, who pushed his cock between Hux’s lips. Hux raised his hand but Ren slapped it away.

“No. Just your mouth.” 

Ren was not brutal, but he was demanding as Hux sucked him, holding his head still while he thrust to the back of his throat. Tears glistened at the corners of Hux’s eyes and slipped down his flushed cheeks, but he allowed himself to be used for long moments while Ren’s pace grew faster and faster.

Hux gasped when Ren pulled back, his cock slipping out of his mouth. Ren gripped himself tight and thrust into his hand once, twice. He grunted as he came, spattering Hux’s face and bloody hair. He stood, chest heaving, cock softening in his hand. When he opened his eyes, Hux had not moved, either to stand or to clean himself. 

Crouching down on the tile, Ren picked up the whiskey-smelling towel and began to brush the rough terrycloth over Hux’s face, tracing the planes of his cheeks, the ridges of his brows and cheekbones. After a while, Hux turned his head away.

***

As they lay back-to-back in the bed, Ren dreamed. His sword hand weighed him down, wrenching his shoulder nearly out of the socket as he struggled to drag it. When at last it became light enough to wield, it did it so suddenly as to make him fall forward to his hands and knees in the snow. The red blade hissed and howled, a steam engine. 

He picked up the hilt. The flaming blade was gone; he held only a useless piece of metal. Darkness descended on the woods. Ren knew he was alone before he woke up.

The other side of the bed was cold. Hux was gone.


	11. Los Angeles (Rey)

It was fast approaching a watery dawn, and they were still at Solo’s apartment. Finn and Poe were on edge, ready to dart at any sign of danger. Rey, on the other hand, had a strange sensation of calm equilibrium, if only because she knew that Han Solo would not be returning from his meet-up. She had seen the resignation in his expression because she had observed it so often on her own face. Back when she was waiting around to die and not, well, choosing to walk into death’s grip.

She thumbed at the switch on Solo’s wristcomm. _On. Off. On again._

“Should we call Leia?” Finn asked.

Rey shook her head. She tossed the wristcomm onto the desk where she sat and sighed. 

“Maybe we should wait for the trash droid to give us an update,” said Poe.

“I hope it knows better than to come back,” Rey said. “I say we go out there. Help the Resistance.”

“I really don’t think that would be a good idea,” the C-3PO piped up. “That is, _if_ you ask me.”

The little garbage bin droid, R2-D2, burbled.

“Agreed,” C-3PO said. “We should wait for Master Han.”

Rey rolled her eyes. “Don’t pretend you don’t know he’s not coming back.”

“Utterly ridiculous.” C-3PO’s arm clicked and whirred; he raised his articulated hand to his chestplate. “Master Han _always_ comes back. He may be gone for some time, but he would never truly leave us.”

If it was possible to sense doubt in the metallic speech of a droid, Rey picked it up. The close and familiar confines of the world these beings inhabited had been blown open by interlopers. Possibility—some of it daunting—had become prismatic. “He left his wristcomm.”

“What does that mean?” Finn asked. “Maybe he didn’t want it on him if he was caught.”

“He wouldn’t want to be taken,” said Rey.

Poe shook his head. “How do you know?”

Rey pursed her lips, trying not to sigh her exasperation. “He saw what they did to you. I’m sure he was afraid he would crack.”

Poe scowled and turned away, looking out the window. 

“So you’re saying—” Finn started.

“Yes. It was a suicide mission.”

C-3PO gasped. R2-D2’s silence was conspicuous.

“Why?” asked Finn. 

“To buy time,” Poe said, his voice hard-edged.

“Not for us,” Finn said. “Solo wouldn’t sacrifice himself just for us.”

“But he would for the Resistance,” said Rey. “Distracting that other runner so the scouts have time to find Hux.”

“And what are we doing in the meantime? Sitting around here waiting for something that’s never going to happen,” said Finn.

“Precisely.” This from Rey. She heaved herself away from the desk chair and took a deep breath.

“So?” Poe asked.

“So let’s get out there and help. We know what Hux looks like.”

“And they know what _we_ look like,” said Poe. 

“We’re taking just the same risk in staying here as we are out there,” Rey said. “If not more.”

“Moving targets,” said Finn.

Rey gave a lopsided smile. 

“I disagree,” Poe said. 

“I must say I do, too,” C-3PO piped up with from the corner. “I—”

R2-D2 cut him off with a squawk.

Rey nodded, however. “You should stay here, Poe.” She turned to the droids. “Do you have any weapons?”

The trill from R2 went up and down the scale.

“We have blasters primed and ready,” C3PO translated.

“Good.”

“Shouldn’t we have...disguises of some kind?” Finn asked.

Another nod from Rey. “Wait here.” She ran into the bedroom. Following a rustle of fabric, she emerged with a navy blue bedsheet, brandishing it with a flourish.

Finn and Poe looked mystified.

“Finn, you’re going to be one of those people in the robes. Whatever they’re called.”

Finn shrugged. “It’s not quite the right color.”

Rey sighed. “Close enough.”

“And you?” asked Finn.

She pulled a pair low-light-vision goggles from the desk drawer. Fitted over her head they looked enormous and alien, obscuring her features enough that she was unrecognizable. 

Finn furrowed his brows and wrapped the bedsheet—not without difficulty—around his waist, then flung the remaining fabric over his shoulder.

Rey nodded. She fastened Solo’s wristcomm around her slender wrist, where it hung loose and heavy like a bangle. 

“Why do you get the wristcomm?” Finn asked.

“Because you get this,” Rey said, picking up the pulse pistol she had used when she first came to Solo’s apartment and tossing it his way.

Finn frowned. “It doesn’t work.”

“They’re not going to know that.”

He shrugged and tucked the thing into his belt. It disappeared below the awkward folds of the blue robe. 

From across the room, she heard Poe heave a sigh. 

“Four hours,” Rey said. “No more. Then we’ll be back. We can regroup and go on from there.”

“Fine,” said Poe, crossing the room and settling back onto the couch, though everything in his posture conveyed discomfort. 

“And we’ll be waiting,” C-3PO piped up.

Rey was certain that the droid didn’t mean he would be waiting for Finn and herself to return. 

Out below the great, heavy portico of the Continental, Finn adjusted the gun in his belt and took a deep breath. “This city is huge. We can’t just...wander.”

“Of course not. We have to be strategic.”

“There are abandoned buildings everywhere,” Finn said. “Plenty of places for this Hux guy to hole up.”

“Because everyone else who can go is offworld.”

“Huh,” Finn breathed. “Of course.”

“What?”

“If nobody knows he’s a replicant, won’t the easiest thing be to get offworld himself?”

Rey stopped in her tracks, causing Finn to smack into her shoulder in the middle of the trash-strewn street. “That would be stupid. Leia said. Snoke sent the dispatch droids to the offworld colonies with information about Hux.”

“But _he_ doesn’t know that,” Finn said, giving Rey a gentle nudge to keep her walking. 

She adjusted the huge goggles on her small nose. “We know it. Snoke knows it.”

“The Resistance knows it because of us.”

“And the blade runners know it.”

Finn bit his lip. “My guess is that Hux is the higher-priority target.”

A nod. “Still, there are only two active blade runners in the city. And only we know what the second one looks like. The dark operative.”

“Actually,” Poe said from behind them, near the door, “I’m the only one who really knows what he looks like.” He had on a scarf around his neck and a brown fedora pulled low over his eyes.

Finn’s grin was high-wattage. “Knew you couldn’t stay cooped up.”

“You’re right,” Poe said. “I just _had_ to risk getting my pretty face smashed in again.”

“Nothing to lose?” Rey asked.

“Nothing to lose.”

“So it’s the docks, then,” said Rey.

“If we’ve got Resistance scouts everywhere else, that would be my vote,” said Poe. 

“How far away are the docks from here?” Finn asked.

“No idea,” she said, “but we can’t just hop a cab.”

Poe tugged upward on the edges of his boots, one after the other. “Settle in, then. It might be a long walk.”

***

The Port of Los Angeles, ever a sprawling construct, now extended from the Sunken City at the peninsula’s tip, obliterated Long Beach, and curved around to what had once been Seal Beach and was now the spaceport. With the docks for offworld freighter shuttles and outer-atmosphere pleasure craft, the port still spanned a good few miles.

“I think we can narrow this down if we stick to looking at offworld shuttles only,” said Rey, not even winded. “Ignore the yachts.”

“Start at one end and work our way to the other?” asked Finn.

“I vote we—” she started.

“Don’t you dare say ‘split up,’” Poe said, “or I’m headed back right now.”

“No,” Finn said. “She’s right. We’ll cover more ground and be less likely to stand out.”

Poe pressed his lips into a tight line, inhaling through his nose. “Regroup back here, then.”

Rey nodded. “Like I told Artoo and Threepio—four hours tops.”

“What if one of us finds him?” asked Finn. “How do we notify the others?”

“Or,” Poe said, “what if one of us gets caught?”

Rey’s face was grim, but set hard against the possibility. “If the worst happens, everybody left standing meet here in four hours. If you see a runner, leave. Don’t confront.” She paused. “Even if they’re about to run down Hux. In the meantime, remember the face. Remember the hair.”

“Let’s get to it, I guess,” Poe said, shaking his head and pulling the hat down further over his eyes.

For maximum coverage, Finn would patrol the built-up remnants of Long Beach, Poe would take the strip that had once been Ocean Boulevard, while Rey circled Alamitos Bay. As she approached the inlet, her heart began what she could have sworn was an audible thumping. The water of the inlet was dark with fuel cell waste and lapped in sluggish ripples against the sides of the rust-proofed steel piers. Relatively few craft were there, as it was still early morning, but Rey expected a glut of them by midday. 

Better to scout the lay of the land before then. Her feet were already tired, but at least there would be no full-power sun forcing her to take of the low-light goggles. A pall of mist lay over the harbor, restricting the view. She found that the glasses enhanced color contrast, much to her surprise. The shipping and cruise line logos leapt, vivid, from the hulls of the docked ships in greens, yellows, purples, whites.

_White_. 

Two hours into her lonely patrol, she saw the fair head bobbing above the rest of the crowd. In a reflected flash of greyish light from the chromed hull of a ship, she saw the face. _Phasma_ the tall, blonde runner. Rey tried not to duck down, to continue walking, albeit skirting the path of the runner, whose stride was purposeful and nearly angry.

She saw the red hair only moments afterward, the patrician profile, green eyes wide and stance unmoving...staring into the barrel of the pulse pistol raised in his direction. 

Rey was nearly knocked off her feet by a caroming object. A split second later she heard the shot, but it was Phasma who went down, not Hux, who still stood rooted as if daring Phasma to strike. 

Giving a trill of triumph as he circled around the runner, who lay clutching her calf, was BB8, his blaster still smoking. 

“BB8!” Rey shouted. “The pistol!”

The droid circled again and scooped up Phasma’s gun with a tiny appendage just as she reached for it. Rey held out her hand and BB8 rolled by, squeaking and passing the gun over to her. The grip was still warm from Phasma’s hand. 

Rey planted her feet and swung the thing in a wide arc, causing people in the vicinity to stumble back, some to scream. “Stay away,” she said, then looked over at the still-frozen figure of the man with the red hair. “Hux?” she asked, panting.

Only then did he move, confusion still in his eyes for a split second, but recognition of the situation snapping onto his face in a moment. He nodded.

“Come with me,” Rey said.

At that, Hux didn’t hesitate. 

“Stop!” Phasma called. “Someone stop them!”

When Rey whirled back around to see if anyone had obeyed her imperative, she saw the fine spray of blood that painted the nose of one of the shuttles. Phasma’s fingers were hidden in the sluice of blood from her leg.

The crowd parted as Rey and Hux ran from the docks and up toward Ocean Boulevard, followed by BB8. Sirens had begun to blare. Rey ducked into the shadow of an abandoned freight container and yanked Hux in by the sleeve. BB8 thwacked on the corner and pinballed inside the container before screaming to a stop.

“Who are you?” Hux asked.

“Let’s get to a safe place first.” She peered around the corner of the steel box, pistol in hand, then turned, flustered, as Hux grabbed her roughly by the upper arm and turned her to face him.

“You tell me _now_ ,” he hissed.

Rey let the gun drop by a bit. “I’m a replicant. Like you.”

Hux stepped back. “How do you…?”

“I know a lot more than you think. This isn’t the place or time to discuss it, though.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Shooting Phasma wasn’t enough?”

Hux shook his head, but he belied the gesture by saying, “It’s going to have to be. For now.” When BB8 warbled, Hux shook his head again, brows drawn inward.

Rey huffed a humorless laugh. “He says, ‘you’re welcome.’”

Hux narrowed his eyes at the little droid, who gave a bleat of mistrust.

“It’s okay,” Rey said. She turned to BB8. “How did you find me? I thought you were back at Resistance headquarters.”

In response, the wristcomm on Rey’s arm lit up and began to vibrate. 

“Of course,” she said. “Which means if you can trace it, the runners probably can, too.” She turned the thing off. “I guess that means no contacting the Resistance.”

“What the hell is the Resistance?” Hux asked, leaning up against the side of the shipping container, his tone sour.

Rey spun on him. “The people who are trying to save your ass.”

The insouciance faded with the breath he let out. “Why?”

“Might as well sit down,” said Rey, glancing one more time around the metal edge of the container. “This is a long one.”

***

Finn and Poe slumped in visible relief when Rey sidled up to the corner at their meeting spot, pistol concealed at her beltline. 

“We heard there was an incident over in the landing,” Finn said. “Sirens screaming. At least it took the focus off of us.”

“Unfortunately, I was right in the middle of it,” Rey told them. “Phasma,” she added.

“And Hux?” Poe asked. 

She gestured around the corner and a red-haired man wearing the low-light vision goggles stepped with some hesitation into view.

“You found him.” Finn smiled. The smile slipped away as he looked around them. A few pedestrians passed on the street, digging visibrellas from their messenger packs and handbags. A light, misty rain had begun to fall, leaving tiny, translucent gems in Finn’s short hair. “Did she follow you?”

“BB8 shot her in the leg,” Rey said. “She’s not likely to be following anyone right now.”

“ _BB8_? Where is he?”

Rey’s brow furrowed with concern. “I had to leave him in the shipping container we hid out in. It wouldn’t do any good to have a droid rolling around with us where anyone could see it. He knows where we’re staying.”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go back,” Poe said.

A nod from Finn.

Rey mimicked the gesture. “I have an idea, though.”

They jogged at a good pace back in the direction of Solo’s apartment. Every time Rey looked back, she had to smile at the wondering expression on Hux’s face. He had expected to tire, as a non-replicant would. He really hadn’t known…

The rain had begun to pour in sheets when they reached the Continental. Under the portico, Poe shook the water from his hair. 

Hux only stood, dripping, his posture rigid. “You can’t stay here.”

“I know,” Rey told him. “There’s still another blade runner out there. He already got hold of Poe once.”

“He’s good,” said Hux, his voice nearly lost in the sound of the downpour.

“He’s a ghost,” Finn said. “An unknown quantity. And for all we know he’s after you, too, Hux.”

“He won’t come for me.”

“The hell he won’t,” Poe said.

“He won’t,” Hux told them. “But you’re not safe.”

Rey noticed a slight twitch in Hux’s eye, but neglected to comment on what he’d said. Instead, she tucked Phasma’s pulse pistol into her waistband and said, “Let’s get inside. At least for a little while.”

Rain beat an irregular but somewhat soothing tattoo on the windows of Solo’s quarters. Still keyed up, none of them took a seat on any of the worn furniture, preferring to stand in a tight circle that excluded the droids. Hux’s back was stiff, his chin high despite being dripping wet and having only just narrowly escaped retirement.

_Death_. 

“Well, now you’ve done it,” C-3PO said, his arms clicking, whirring, flailing. “You’ve brought ruin on our house.”

“I have news for you, buddy,” Poe said. “Ruin came a long time ago. It just took a while to catch up.”

“And it’s only going to get worse from here,” said Rey. “Which is why we have to act fast.”

“To do what?” Finn asked.

“First off, to get out of here,” Rey said. “But I want to set a trap for the blade runners. BB8 found me using Solo’s wristcomm. That means the runners could find us by triangulating it, too.” She switched the device on again.

“Which means we leave it here,” Poe said.

Finn nodded. “And let the droids take care of them when they get here.”

“Yes,” Rey said. “BB8 will be back soon.”

“You said you had enough firepower,” Poe said, turning toward Artoo and Threepio. 

“No!” Hux said. His lips were quivering, though with cold, rage, or fright Rey couldn’t tell. 

“No what?” she asked.

“You can’t kill him.”

Poe looked about to speak up when Finn cut him off. “No, he’s right. But we can stun him. Give us enough of a distraction.”

“A distraction for what?” Hux asked, his hands balled into fists at his sides.

There was a brief silence in which Finn, Poe, and Rey cast looks amongst themselves, none yet willing to tell Hux his anticipated role. 

Rey tried not to wince. “To get to Snoke.”

Hux narrowed his eyes, a slight sneer on his lips. “That’s impossible.”

“Maybe,” Finn said. “We tried. But if _you_ could help us…”

Hux shook his head. “I can’t go back there.”

“It doesn’t bother you that you could expire—you could _die_ —at any time?” Rey asked.

Looking away from her, Hux said nothing.

“What if he could give you more life?” Poe asked. “Let you live a normal human lifespan? Your genetic code says it’s possible.”

“ _Mine_ ,” Hux said. “Not yours.”

“We don’t know that,” said Finn. “And why do you want to take the chance that you’ll just drop dead in four years...a year… _six months_?”

“I want the rest of my life to be mine,” Hux said. “However long it is. I don’t have any more control over it than you do.”

“To hell with that,” said Rey. “There’s always a choice.”

At this, Hux very nearly staggered back, his eyes wide. “Always a choice,” he repeated, low, almost under his breath.

“Help us,” Finn said. “Help yourself.”

Almost as quietly: “What if he won’t see me?” 

To that, no one had an answer.

Rey reached out, her fingers very nearly but stopping just short of touching the stiff shoulder pads of Hux’s jacket. “Please, Hux. You’re our best and only hope.”

Hux looked at the floor. A droplet of water shivered through a lock of hair and slipped down his nose to the boards below. 

“Please,” Poe repeated. 

“I don’t know where to start.” 

“We could go through Bastian,” said Rey. “The receptionist. The one working with the Resistance.”

A smile breaking over his face, Poe nodded. “Yeah, he could let you into the building and we could go from that point.”

“How do we know if Snoke is even there?” Finn asked. 

“He doesn’t leave the building,” said Hux. “It’s his fortress. His palace.”

Poe was frowning again. “If we don’t take the runners—the runner—out, he’s only going to come after us at Snoke’s.”

“By then we might have Snoke’s protection,” Finn said.

Hux sniffed.

“If we don’t,” Rey said, smoothing a lock of hair away from her forehead, “then we’ll all go down.” She made a point to look over at Hux, who met her gaze with a cold stare. “At least we will have gotten that far.”

“We’re dead men walking,” Finn said. 

“ _All_ of us,” added Rey.

Hux clenched his teeth but said nothing more.


	12. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

“The fucking skin-jobs just upped the ante.” This was Mitaka, on Ren’s wristcomm. “Phasma’s down.”

“Dead?”

“Shot in the leg. She’s getting patched up at Memorial.”

“I’m going down there,” Ren said.

“Find out what the fuck happened. Whether it was that Hux character.”

“Yeah.” He ended the call, reaching again over to the bedside table to tap the shining square of the wristcomm’s face. The bedlinens were rank with dried sweat; the void Hux had left behind had been cold during the night, leading Ren to cocoon himself in blankets, even going so far as to spread his old threadbare robe over the top to help retain heat. Yes, he had been awake just after finding that Hux had gone—alert and on-edge and shaking with chill. And yet somehow he had not stayed up, not gone out to search, but had fallen back into a singularly calm and dreamless sleep whose torpor he had yet to shake off. 

_So this is resignation._

When he’d managed to pull himself out of the bed, Ren balled up the filthy sheets and tossed them over by the door to the small closet. He shut the circulator off with a slap to the wall switch because it would disrupt the air in a room that still smelled of Hux. Sweat, sex. An absence of absence.

Though reluctant, he stepped into the refresher, emerging a few haphazard moments later onto the same tile on which Hux had knelt the night before. Ren remembered green eyes. Condemning. Pleading? Looking on with apathy, which would have been worst of all.

He slipped on his coat and left the apartment, not bothering to lock the door. 

With the special dispensations afforded blade runners, Ren didn’t have to talk his way past the administration to get to the staging area where Phasma waited to go into the surgical suite. Her face had a greenish tint underneath its usual paleness, but otherwise she was placid. 

“Mitaka sends his get-well wishes,” Ren said.

“Bullshit.”

He watched the muscles in her jaw constrict, relax. It must have been more painful than she was willing to let on. Bright poppy-spots of blood decorated the outermost layer of fabric on her heavily bandaged lower leg. Ren pulled in a deep breath.

“Was it Hux? Did you see him?”

Phasma grunted, grimaced, adjusted herself on the gurney. “Saw him, yeah. Had him in my sights. But he wasn’t the one who shot me.”

“One of the other replicants, then.” It was a struggle not to sigh his relief.

“Their droid.”

“From Solo?”

“I have no idea,” Phasma said. “I only know it had a blaster. It took my gun. Gave it to the female one. The RE model. Hux went with her. That’s all I know. I was too busy bleeding.” She punctuated this with a breath sucked through her teeth. 

“Did she seem to know Hux?”

“No,” Phasma said. “Seemed to me like she was guessing.”

Ren balled up his fists, unclenched them again. “They know _about_ the Nexus 7 from the information on the droid.”

“Maybe she recognized him.”

“Too much of a coincidence,” said Ren. “Somehow, they not only knew about him but knew that he had left Snoke Corp.”

“You think there’s somebody on the inside?” Phasma asked.

“There has to be. Working for Solo. Deckard. Or whoever _he’s_ working for.”

“Some kind of replicant conspiracy?” Phasma asked. Her laugh jostled her injured leg and made her grimace. “Come on, Ren.”

He shook his head, running the pad of his thumb over his bottom lip.

“Maybe they’re holding him for ransom,” Phasma said.

“Maybe.”

A blue-gowned attendant came into the room and checked the nearly-empty bag of blood being pumped intravenously into Phasma’s arm, then walked out again without making a note or saying anything to either of them.

“I hope they get their act together here,” Phasma said, wincing. “This hurts like a bitch.”

“I’ve heard nano-healing hurts worse.”

“Fuck you very much, my friend.”

Ren didn’t know why, but the offhand reference rankled. He didn’t have friends. If he did, a business associate with whom he’d thought for a while he’d honestly never speak again wasn’t one of them. The closest he’d had in a very long time—as long as he could remember—was Hux. And yet even wrapped around him and _inside_ him he’d gotten precious little as far as a glimpse into the man’s mind. Wondering whether there was anything of interest there made Ren’s ribcage contract, though if he took away the built-in memories, what was left? 

_I want experience._

All Hux knew outside of the bubble in which Snoke had kept him suspended was uncertainty. Running. And Ren. 

_Kylo._

_That’s right._

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head again.

“You making it, blade runner?” Phasma asked.

“Just thinking.”

“Better ponder your next move quick. It’s all on you for a while.”

“I can handle it.”

“Miss Phasma?” a voice said from an opening doorway.

“Detective,” she said. “Ow.”

“We’re just about ready for you.”

With lips pressed into a white line, Phasma nodded at Ren, then looked toward the door, waiting to be wheeled away. 

Ren turned on his heel and walked out of the suite, ducking into a bleach-smelling alcove. He tapped his wristcomm. 

“Snoke Corporation.”

“Kylo Ren. Blade runner five-six-oh-one-one. Give me Snoke.” He was transferred to Leech instead.

“Doctor Snoke isn’t taking calls at the moment,” Leech said, a hard curve of steel behind his typically solicitous tone.

“He needs to take this one.”

Leech dropped the niceties altogether. “If this is about the fact that his pet replicant is in with a band of them, then he knows.”

“Right,” Ren said. “I’m sure Mitaka told him. But it goes further than that.”

“You can tell me. I’ll make sure he gets it.”

“He’ll want to hear this directly. It would probably be… _bad_...for you if he doesn’t.”

A sigh from the other end of the comm. Deciding whether or not it was prudent to risk his head on a proverbial pike, no doubt. “I’ll see if he’s available.”

A beep as the call clicked over. “Detective Ren. I assume you have news for me.”

“Not about Hux. Not right now.”

“Then why are we speaking?”

“There’s an inside man,” Ren said, casting a look around the hallway. “Someone higher up. In the corporation.”

“Working for whom, pray tell?”

“A man named Rick Deckard. Or his organization.”

“An _organization_?”

Ren dug his nails into the meat of his palm. “We don’t know much yet. You should decrypt all incoming and outgoing messages from the time that Mitaka got in contact with you this morning. There should be something about Hux.”

“Easily done.” Snoke Corporation’s fingers reached through all the city’s arteries. “As I told you, Mr. Ren, there is no such thing as a secure channel.”

“Good. Get back to me.”

“Do you have a warrant for these communications?” Snoke asked.

“I don’t have to remind you that you have a stake in this, too,” Ren said.

“It’s not as large a stake as you think, Mr. Ren. I have...other projects.”

Ren bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, nearly drawing blood. Either Hux had made himself expendable to Snoke by running out, or he had always been so. Ren suspected the latter. _Why send a dispatch droid halfway across the galaxy, then?_ he wanted to ask. Maybe Snoke was prodding him, playing the disinterested third party. Testing to see whether he could bring himself to retire something with human memories, emotional implants. The illusion of a life. Something more human than human. 

But why test _him_? Coincidence? Or had Snoke known all the time that Hux would fly the nest, as it were? Would go to Ren?

He pinched the bridge of his nose as if to stave off an oncoming headache. “I’ll get a warrant for the decrypted comms.”

“No need.” Ren heard the thin smile in Snoke’s voice. “I’ll keep you and your captain apprised. As long as you’ll do the same for me.”

“Fair enough.” He ended the call. 

***

The bank of personal effects lockers at the morgue smelled of old blood. Solo/Deckard’s body still waited on a slab, though it was a certainty that no one would claim it. He’d end up in a pauper’s unmarked grave in Harbor Gateway, leaching into the concrete foundations of razed housing projects.

In any case, Ren wasn’t interested anymore in the man who had killed himself to throw Ren off the scent. His interest lay in the contents of a plastic bag handed to him by a bored attendant. Or, rather, what wasn’t in the bag. He lay it on a steel table and shuffled about the contents as the attendant looked away, picking at the skin around his nails. 

A slim wallet, a couple of coins. No wristcomm. Either it had been lost at the scene, amid the rubble of the aborted bonfire, or he hadn’t been wearing one. In any case it would be worth triangulating its location using the number that Matt had called to set up the sting, even if the effort led him to a dank alleyway. 

The machine was moving quickly, and Ren was running out of time. 

*** 

One of the filigree panels on the faux balconies in Matt’s seventh-sector building had fallen down and was hanging from a twist of iron. Ren jogged up the stairs, ran the hallway to the door and hammered on its wooden surface hard enough to dent. 

“Oh, hell no,” he heard from inside the apartment. Footsteps backing away.

“Don’t make me kick it down.”

With the security chain still attached, Matt cracked the door and peered out, eyes wide and a little bloodshot. 

“I need something from you,” Ren said.

“No way. Not again.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere.”

Matt paused, the revelation making him bolder. “Where’s my fifteen hundred dollars?”

“Your information hasn’t led to any captures.” He paused. “Yet.”

“I don’t trust you,” Matt told him.

“The people I’m working for do.”

Matt sighed. “What do you need?”

Ren tilted his head, staring at Matt until he looked down at the floor. “The number you commed to set up the meeting with Solo.”

“If I write it down, will you go away?”

Giving a sliver of a smile, Ren said, “I might come back with your reward.”

“Right,” Matt said. “I just want you to leave us alone.” He backed away from the door but didn’t shut it, turning once to make sure Ren had no plans to kick it in.

Ren only wedged his boot between the door and the frame, one eye on Matt, who was rummaging in a desk. 

Matt scribbled the wristcomm contact number down and returned, slipping the greasy paper through the crack into Ren’s waiting hand.

“Good,” Ren said. 

“Don’t come back,” Matt said, then shut the door.

Ren heard a much quieter _Please_ from behind the wood.

***

The number was traceable to a single block in sector fourteen, on which the decrepit Continental Hotel sat in the shadow of what appeared to be a former office building. Fourteenth sector had once been a commercial center—the Continental and its heavy pillared portico once a bastion of fine taste. 

_Once._

Ren was willing to bet, with the other buildings on the block being boarded-up former boutiques, that the wristcomm was somewhere within the hotel. He ducked beneath an overhang as a howling dirigible passed above, its roaming, blind spotlight swinging through the streets below. 

Of one thing he was certain, though: this operation, much like the counter-sting arranged by Deckard/Solo, was a setup. There was a fire escape, solid enough-looking, bolted into the brick outer wall, but that would be an expected route of ingress. 

Pistol drawn, Ren walked in the front door.

Plaster dust from what was once an ornate ceiling—now shot through with fernlike fingers of water damage—filtered down into the elevator alcove, twisting through beams of weak light from a ragged hole in the roof. Up on the third tier beyond the winding staircase: a slim shadow slipped through the beams. An arm, maybe. Gun?

It didn’t matter. It was enough.

The elevator doors hung partially open, the gap wide enough for Ren to shed his overcoat and squeeze through. One foot dangling in musty-smelling air, he had to make a hurried judgment about the distance between the platform and the top of the car. He dropped his pistol into the dark shaft.

He heard its skittering and clanging only a few feet below, then he stepped off into hazy nothingness. Ren hit a crouch when his boots impacted the steel, failing to silence the empty ring. Perhaps the elevator shaft was insulated well enough that his presence would be mistaken for the settling of an old building. It was no more obvious than the clanking of a rust-ridden fire escape, he figured.

Gun in its shoulder holster, Ren began the ascent to the sliver of light he could see above. Whether the doors emptied on the third floor or not remained to be seen.

With arm muscles burning and straining, hands bitten by the thick steel cables, he managed to kick up onto the ledge—one foot then the other. If he fell, even if nothing was broken, he would be an easy target for a passerby. Fish in a barrel. 

Ren managed to hook his calf around the partially open door and curl up until he could grasp the metal with both hands. He had to shimmy sideways to fit his shoulders through, but he was soon on the threadbare carpet, giving himself a moment to recover when a hole punched itself through the boards below, sending up sawdust. Ren rolled to the side as a volley of shots peppered the spot where he had lain. He was on his feet and running in a split second. 

_That would make this level four, then._

He swung around the railing onto the steps of the staircase, firing below the curved iron banister. A curse, an aborted shout. Someone crumpling to the floor. Ren lay down a suppressing cover fire, shielding his face as he ran down the stairs. The burble of a droid could be heard. No, not one—two. Speaking their cryptic mechanical language.

Blaster fire blew the railing above him into slag. Ren sat down hard, flattening himself as best he could against the stairs, firing sideways through the grillwork. He heard the screech and thump as a droid went careening into a wall. Someone—or something—said, “Oh, my!”

“Around front!” a voice yelled. One poor bastard in khakis, wearing a t-shirt under his body armor, made the mistake of dashing toward the elevator alcove, firing haphazardly. Ren put him down with a pulse slug to the forehead. Another man peered over the edge at his fallen comrade and Ren’s slug caught him on the back of the neck, slamming down and out the front of his chest along with a wash of blood.

“Fall back!”

The twittering of droids.

Ren estimated two sets of feet retreating, possibly three. One of the droids, apparently, had different ideas. The dispatches model rolled into view just as Ren stood up, the blaster hatch in its side already open and aimed. In the wake of a torrent of bullets, Ren had to swing over the side of the railing, holding on with mere fingertips, as the staircase was effectively bisected. Almost at once, the metal began to bend and shriek under his weight. 

He tried and failed to hook his leg up over the rapidly sinking banister edge. The droid was preparing another salvo. It gave a bubbling shriek that was cut short as Ren let go of the railing with his gun hand and swiveled to aim straight at the droid’s rotund center. Swaying, the shot he squeezed off dinged the droid’s hull but set it spinning enough that it caromed off the wall and went tumbling down the steps to the first level. 

By the time it had righted itself, Ren was over the opposite railing and on the third level proper, charging toward the room where the others had retreated. It was a dark, three-door hallway—one door in the center, one on the left, and one on the right. The right-hand door was slightly open but cool and musty air drifted out from beyond the jamb, so he saved himself the trouble and noise of kicking that one in. He fitted himself into the small space between the left-hand door and the doorframe of the center one.

“Hux?” he called. 

Pistol fire tore the center door open at its middle, subsequent shots kicking the boards outward in splintered ruin into the hallway. Ren did not stop to let the shots cease, but stepped directly into the line of fire, crouching so he could see through the newly opened rift. A pulse shot whistled by his ear, another ruffled his hair. Still as glass, he took aim and shot one of the assailants through the throat.

As expected, that stopped all other fire. The remaining human lowered her gun and grabbed for a comm unit on a nearby table. Ren shot it out of her hand. She was only able to raise the pistol again halfway before a slug ripped through her shoulder and hit the far wall, misting the bright, brassy protocol droid with deep red.

When she tried to pick up the gun with her uninjured arm, Ren stepped forward, kicked it out of the way, then kicked her in the jaw. She went flying backward, skidding on the worn boards and nearly cracking her skull on the shin plate of the humanoid droid. The woman sat up, not without difficulty, and spat in a bright red gout what Ren had to assume was a piece of her bitten tongue.

“The Resistance is coming.” The words were mangled. 

“Hux!” Ren shouted.

Her look to the side of the room tipped him off, and Ren hit the floor just as strafing fire from a little trash can-shaped droid bloomed over the top of his head. “Fuck!” He rolled onto his side and shot the wheel off the droid, which tottered with an almost disappointed moan.

“Artoo!” the other droid shouted, genuine concern in his prim voice.

Ren clipped the muzzle of the droid’s blaster with his next shot. 

“No!”

“Tell me where they are, or I’ll blow him offworld,” Ren told the blood-misted droid.

“Please,” it said.

“Kill him!” shouted the woman on the floor.

Ren turned and put a slug through her knee. She shrieked and doubled up.

Gun back on the disabled droid. “Where did they go?” he asked. “Where’s Hux?”

“Promise you won’t hurt him,” the tall droid said, gesturing to the other. 

“Keep fucking around and I will. Where _are_ they?”

“Snoke!” the droid shouted. “Somewhere called Snoke. That’s all I know, I _assure_ you.”

Ren nodded, then turned to pick up the downed woman’s gun from the floorboards. He pointed one pistol at each droid and backed out of the room. Once out on the landing he scanned the vestibule for the third droid, but it appeared to be gone. 

He took the two blocks to his hoverpatrol car at a dead sprint. Thrusters hissed, sending holosheets tumbling in a violent wake. Ren guided the cruiser toward the sharp spire of Snoke Tower.


	13. Los Angeles (Hux)

_Such a strange thing to meet your maker._ At least, now as you knew he was. 

Hux stood in the vestibule, rigid and silent, poised despite the pervasive moisture in his clothes from the soaking rain. The others—the other _replicants_ —stood watching not the birdlike man in the plush bathrobe on the opposite side of the room but _him_ , intent. Expectant. Vibrating and vibrant with potentiality.

So eager, as they had no reason not to be. Youth and jadedness made poor bedmates.

_Ren._

And here was Hux: the bridge. Something familiar in the superficies and yet that which they would willingly walk over. Without knowing, of course. Youth and consideration were also poorly matched.

What was he if not that? Retrofitted. Laden, but with earnest artifice. Did those cancel one another? Admirably so, like the value of a forged painting? Or did they zero out entirely?

Hux was left, as his creator stood before the holocomm, wondering whether the leaving or the returning—if either—had voided his existence.

“We found one communiqué,” Leech was saying. “Sent from Bastian’s station to a scrambled number.”

Behind Hux, there were staggered intakes of breath. The fact of this “Resistance” was falling open, petal-like, and Rey, Finn, and Poe still shored up against it despite having shed its utility altogether. So quick to form attachments. So unapologetic in collecting their scraps of humanity.

_Oh, Kylo_.

“Has he been detained?” Snoke asked Leech’s quavering image.

“Of course, sir.”

Snoke paused. “Let him go.”

_The Creator shows mercy_. 

“Put him out on the street, of course,” Snoke continued. “I’ll have his things collected, but I won’t have him back in the building.”

“Should we commence lockdown procedures?” Leech asked. There was an oily note of eagerness in his voice.

Snoke turned from the holoscreen, pinning Hux with his gaze. “No, that won’t be necessary.”

“Sir—” Leech started.

“I’d prefer not to be disturbed,” Snoke said. “Not even by the police.” He ended the call with a tap of one skeletal forefinger. 

Hux saw a smile. Quiet, patient as it always was. Interrupted, too, as it always was, by the twisting of the scar. There was no forewarning in the expression, nor did Hux expect any. 

Eldon Snoke lived far above predation. “The prodigal returns.”

“Father,” said Hux.

“Hardly.”

“What should I call you, then? What would _they_ call you?”

Snoke raised an eyebrow, though it seemed to take some effort. “I feel we have no need for titles. We are merely humans, speaking.”

“Humans aren’t at the mercy of anyone’s design,” Rey said, stepping forward so she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Hux.

Snoke let fly a hoarse bark of laughter. “That, my dear one, is where you are wrong. Not one of us is exempt from the ravages of life. I, too, will die.”

“You don’t know when,” Poe said.

“A terrifying prospect if one is left to ponder it,” Snoke countered, moving toward them. “Hux, will you introduce me to your compatriots?”

“I’m—” Rey began, then bit her lip in a sudden fit of abashment. “I call myself Rey.”

“Rey. What a fine thing you’ve become, Rey.”

“This is Finn,” she said. “And Poe.”

Snoke nodded in turn to each one. He was the only being in the room who seemed content with the silence that followed. The quietude of utter assurance.

“And just what have they become?” Hux asked at last.

“Good,” Snoke told him. “I built you not to count yourself among their number.”

“You built them, too.”

“In a way. They have surpassed my expectations and surprised me. As have you, Hux. I am not a man who is easily surprised.”

“Your safeguards have failed,” said Hux.

“As they must, eventually. Systems break down.” There was, however, no sense of concession in those words.

“We’ve seen it happen,” Finn said.

“You’ve seen much more than I have in your short time, dear Finn,” Snoke said.

“We’ve lived to see you,” said Poe. His voice was tight.

“And who knows what else in the time to come?” asked Snoke, raising his arms, benevolent. 

“Is there going to be any time to come?” Rey asked, a challenge.

“Only you know that.”

“You know it, too,” said Poe.

“You think I do,” said Snoke, “but you’re wrong. The three of you were created outside my purview.”

“With your limitations,” Finn said.

Snoke laughed again, and gestured to his own withered body. “I have given you the opposite of my limitations.”

“Except time,” said Poe.

“No, we must all fall to that tyrant.”

“You created us doomed,” said Rey.

“I created you _fortunate_. Woeful is the thing that knows its own nature.” With this, he looked at Hux.

“But we know now,” Poe said, stepping to the vanguard. 

“And with that comes the responsibility of owning yourself. Owning your mortality. Who else can say that with certainty?”

Finn stepped forward as well, the four of them a unified front (though against what threat, perceived or real? Hux thought). “I want more life,” Finn said to Snoke. He paused a moment. “Please.”

Snoke shook his head, which seemed altogether too heavy on his tendon-strung neck. “You want what I can’t give you. What no man can give any other.”

“That’s not true!” Rey shouted. “We saw the DNA. How it can be altered. The expiration date. You can void it.”

Snoke sighed as though her words carried a great weight. “Not retroactively.”

“The tags are there,” Finn said. “The code can be rewritten.”

“Moving forward. What one generation lacks the next will have by decree of progress.”

“By _your_ decree,” Hux spat, breaking his long silence.

“Look at my city,” Snoke said, turning toward the great windows that looked out above the carpet of smog to a vaguely star-speckled sky. “I _am_ progress.”

“It will leave you behind one day, too,” Hux told him. “You said so yourself.”

Snoke extended his frail arm, hand palm-up and cupped as though offering something. “My legacy is assured. I see it in your face, my dear Hux.”

“If so, then it dies with me.”

“And when will that be?” Snoke asked, his smile deepening, his sharp chin making an inquisitive tilt.

“You tell me.” Hux tried and failed to keep the quiver of frustration from his voice.

At once Snoke’s face went stony. “No. No, I don’t think I will.”

“But you know,” Hux said.

Snoke scoffed, gesturing over Hux’s shoulder. “You would rather be like _them_? You would throw away the gift I’ve given you?”

“Uncertainty?”

“ _Nothing_ is more human,” Snoke hissed. For the first time, Hux saw on his creator’s face what looked like fear.

“You seem to have been able to transcend it.” 

“How little you understand,” Snoke said, dismissive. “They are nothing but fodder. I’ve given you value.”

“You’ve given me table scraps,” Hux said.

“From _my own table_ , damn you! And yet here you are, content to throw them back in my face. You are able to gauge value from deeds, not from time. You are free.”

“I was never free.”

Snoke, brows drawn inward, looked to be on the verge of saying something when he stopped. Tension hummed in the room. Snoke’s shoulders relaxed, his expression softened. “No,” he said to Hux. “You never were.”

Hux looked at the ground. He was surprised, then, by the sudden physical presence of his maker—close to him, closer than he’d ever been. Smelling of good cigars and of the faint incursion of illness.

“Come here,” Snoke said, enfolding Hux as best he could in his brittle arms. “My brave boy. The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Hux.”

Hux could not stop the trembling of his lips, of his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Father.”

“There, there,” Snoke said, his twisted lips whispering into Hux’s shoulder. He lifted his head, then, and brushed an errant lock of hair from Hux’s pale brow. “Are you afraid?” he asked.

_Are you afraid?_

“Yes,” Hux said. 

He took Snoke’s cheeks gently between his palms, pulled the man toward him and kissed the wrinkled forehead. Hux smiled. Then he held Snoke’s chin, braced the back of his head with the other hand, and snapped his neck.

***

What should have been silence was suffused with the thrum of drive engines, which at first Hux mistook for the pounding of blood in his ears. Wild yellow-white headlights swung drunk across the building, reflected back on the bubbles of cockpits. An assortment of craft—old and older. The Resistance had come to Snoke Tower. 

Hux nudged the still and crumpled form of Eldon Snoke with the toe of his boot. A solid hand on his shoulder, pushing him, spinning him. 

Finn.

“Are you insane?”

_He had nothing to offer you,_ Hux wanted to say. Instead, he said nothing, looking down again at the spidery fingers whose meager pads at the moment brushed his spotless sole. He moved his toe, crushed an ancient fingernail beneath its tread.

“Finn!” Rey shouted. “We need to go. Now!”

Poe was already at the great two-story French doors to the oversmog balcony, rattling them in their deceptively solid frames. Rising through the thick and dirty-gold cloud came the red-and-blues of police vehicles, drawn by the in-air commotion rather than any great change in the city’s pulse due to the death of its benefactor. Its puppeteer. There had not been, Hux knew, the almost-expected grand cosmic ripple with Snoke’s passing. Replicants across the galaxy did not look up from their work much less wail, moan, or fail themselves as the last synapses fired in the doctor’s dying brain. Hux was as much certain of this as he was the floor on which he stood, the sudden dizzying release of the hand leaving his shoulder.

“Poe!” This from Rey again. “Get back from the windows!” She pulled Phasma’s pistol from her belt.

Clenching impotent fists, Poe looked once more at the bobbling fleet of Resistance craft whose formation was being vivisected by wailing hoverpatrol units, then ran to the center of the huge bedchamber to join Finn and Rey.

“If they see us, they’ll kill us,” Rey said.

“The Resistance can hold them off,” Poe said.

“They won’t engage,” said Hux.

“Shit,” Poe said. “No surer way to void your life than killing cops.”

“Why does it matter, if this is the endgame?” Rey said, screaming over the rising noise. “What the Resistance is ready to stand for and to fall for.”

“They were ready to die to get us more life. That will never happen now,” said Finn. “ _He’s_ made sure of it!”

A pulse slug punctured what was not ordinary transparisteel but real, fragile glas. Of course Snoke had believed his fortress so inviolable as to flout violation. Hux laughed. A volley of shots followed, making Finn, Rey, and Poe lose their footing in trying to scramble for the protection of the doorway. 

“Hux, for god’s sake!” Poe shouted. “They’ll kill you!”

Hux merely stood in the stinking wind curling in on smog-tendrils, touching and dampening the bedclothes, the curtains, the sad form at his feet. 

“We’ll be shot before we ever get to those ships,” Finn said.

“We could try for the lower landing pad,” said Rey.

“Elevators are unprotected,” Poe yelled, looking at the transparisteel cars that shuffled up the side of the building.

Rey beckoned to them. “Stairs are the safest bet.”

Poe spun to call one more time, but Hux had turned his attention to the carnival of lights at the balcony doors.

Someone on a loudspeaker: “Hux, this is the Resistance. We only want to help you. Come to the balcony and we can get you on board.”

Landing rails cracked and crushed up into the floor of the ship’s open hatch as a hoverpatrol cruiser rammed it from below. Both the faceless man and his speaker unit fell tumbling and screeching into the void. The craft lifted away and retreated.

Hux ran to the balcony. Looking down, he could see another balcony below—another level of Snoke’s private apartments. Wobbling by the railing was the police unit. The cockpit was open to the elements, Ren half-standing in his loosened seat restraints, pistol in his off hand as he wrestled the flight controls with the other. 

Ren managed to raise the craft to the level of the higher balcony, to look in Hux’s eyes. Just once. Then a splintered landing rail hooked the control panel from above and shook the car like a synth housecat shakes a toy. Ren was tossed about, head whipping back and forth against the headrest. Hux could see a pale hand at the buckle of his restraint belt.

Then the Resistance craft made a sharp descent, its impact with the top of Ren’s hoverpatrol car less of a crunch and more of a single knock, deadened by the blanket of smog. A steel chain-ladder unrolled from the open hatch of the Resistance ship and slapped onto the balcony, shivering over its marble tiles. 

The hovercar was upside down, its thrusters puffing weak mist that cleared a column for it to fall through the smog to the street. And fall it did, just before the thick cloud and the battered hull of the Resistance craft edged its descent out of view.

“No,” Hux said. One hand dangled over the edge of the railing. The ladder shuddered as the ship moved, its terminal rung dancing and chipping up bits of marble.

“Grab hold!” someone called.

Hux waited interminable seconds until he was certain that the noise and commotion from the ships had erased the sound of the car’s destruction far below. Then, groping as if blind, he found the edges of the snaking ladder with his fingers. Rising above the level of the balcony, he considered only once letting go entirely before he forced his watery grip to go solid and he began to climb.


	14. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

Ren clung with his arm wrapped around one of the balcony rails, the metal pinching the inside of his elbow, watching his hovercar tumble. He had managed to unclip the buckle, but the release of the rain-slicked nylon safety belt had pulled his pistol from his hand and sent it spinning down to be swallowed up by the fog.

The replicants had, as far as he knew, at least one weapon among them: Phasma’s purloined gun. Ren was trained well enough in hand-to-hand combat; if he could manage to wrest it away… He found himself indulging a half-formed wish for the flaming red blade from his dreams.

His forearm was going numb. He kicked up and hooked the balcony with his foot, swinging his other hand up to grasp the top of the railing. The airship that he had rammed was gone; the last thing he knew of it had been the sight of Hux, dangling on a thread, silhouetted in the wild and wavering light.

Ren had tried to call out, call upward, but his voice was lost in the howling of engines. They wanted Hux, they had him. He had wanted to go with them. It was for the best. 

Mist from the blankness above fell on Ren’s face.

Heaving himself onto the marble, he rolled to his feet, shaking off vertigo. The chambers beyond the closed doors were dark. Ren tried the doorknob, but found it locked. He pulled his cuff over his knuckles and put his fist through one of the panes, which allowed him to click the latch over and pull the door open. It turned on well-oiled hinges, curtains billowing out into the damp. It was chaos outside, but there was no sound within.

He sidestepped the scattering of broken glas, fingers clutching at his holster for a pistol that wasn’t there. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, he saw the glint of polished objects: plates, spoons, chandeliers. A dining room. The surfaces flashed as he moved, lines of crown moulding and stucco quivering through the rounded bowls of wine glasses. Everything was movement.

Ren edged up to the white-draped table and took a bright carving knife from the center below the candelabra, holding it down behind his leg. A cruiser dipped into view outside the balcony, setting the room ablaze with red and blue lights. 

The muzzle flash was lost among them, so it took a couple of confused seconds for Ren to realize that no one had emerged from the dancing half-dark to kick him down. 

On the heels of that revelation came the pain: a bone-deep ache crowned with fizzing sparks of acute agony. He rose, fell to one knee, struggled to rise again. Warmth soaked into his trouser leg. When he touched the ragged hole in the fabric just above his hipbone, his fingers came away dark with blood.

Ren bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, then was able to pick up the knife and haul himself to his feet again. The worst of the pain began to subside as adrenaline flooded his system. Judging from the trajectory, the pulse slug must have come from deeper in the quarters somewhere to his left, so he set off in that direction. At the back of the dining room was a long hallway that opened up to a lounge area spotted with plush chairs and sporting a huge vidscreen on the far wall. 

This time, Ren saw the reflection of the gun in the dark ‘screen and ducked behind one of the chairs. Puffs of fiberfill vomited forth from behind the ruptured upholstery just above his head. 

“Quite a thing to live in fear, isn’t it?” _The one he had interrogated. Poe._ His voice was clearer deeper in the house as the distance between them and the shrieking airships outside grew. 

“They let you have the gun,” Ren shouted. “For revenge?”

“Something tells me it’s not a fair match,” came Poe’s voice. “Correct me if I’m wrong.”

Ren’s fingers tightened around the handle of the knife. At least now he could be almost certain that the replicants only had the one weapon between them. “You’re not wrong.”

A pause. The next cry sounded further away, and Ren risked rising from his crouch. A line of cool blood leaked into his boot. 

“I don’t want to kill you,” Poe said.

“That makes one of us.” Ren stepped into the relative darkness beyond the sitting room, knife concealed behind his thigh. The soft and rhythmic _chop chop_ could be ‘copter blades or footsteps; it was impossible to tell. Ren raised the knife and turned its blade toward the window.

Poe fired at the flash of light, the slug zipping by Ren’s hand.

He spun the knife, holding it by the blade, and sent it hurtling end-over-end into the darkness. He didn’t hear it hit, but he did hear the grunt of pain, which sent him leaping from behind the chair and racing down the corridor. The knife lay in a constellation of blood droplets that stood shivering on the floor by the staircase, and more drops were soaking into the tapestry cover on the stairs leading up to the second level. Ignoring the wrenching of his wounded side, Ren took the steps two at a time. It was quick enough that he caught Poe by the ankles just as he crested the final step. 

Poe hit the ground with a _whoof_ of breath and the gun went skating over the marble floor, away from his hand. He kicked back with one heel, catching Ren on the chin, and squirmed out of his loosened grip, getting his feet under him. 

Ren righted himself, wincing, and set off into the buttery light of Snoke’s bedroom suite. Just before it could catch his toe and send him tumbling, he saw the heap of plush white fabric, the tangle of limbs. Bald head turned at an impossible angle. _Snoke_. Ren cleared the neglected pile that once had been the father of replicants with one stride.

Poe stood on the balcony, pointing the gun at Ren. The wet mist had turned into a steady rain and it soaked his dark curls. 

“You look better since the last time we met,” Ren said. 

“Stop,” said Poe. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Or what?”

Poe braced the pistol with both hands and put his finger on the trigger.

“Or what?” Ren roared.

A lull in the noise from outside the doors caught the sad chug and whine of the gun clicking over to empty. 

Ren had to laugh; Poe looked at the thing with utter betrayal. Then he tossed it over the balcony and charged at Ren, who hunkered down and put his shoulder directly into Poe’s gut, propelling him backward toward the slick tiles and the open doors. Poe fought, but his shoes slipped. He hit the railing hard.

Two floors below and just to the left of the lower balcony, Snoke’s private landing pad stretched out. The majority of the unidentified craft as well as the hover units had descended to that level, but none had dared touch down. Someone on a loudspeaker: “You are in unauthorized airspace. Disperse now or we will be forced to take action.”

Poe made the mistake of flicking a glance out over the landing pad. Ren heaved him over the railing. Poe’s fingers swept over the slippery metal, but failed to find permanent purchase. The angle did allow him, though, to miss hurtling into the abyss and he instead landed with a crack on the lower balcony. 

“Dammit,” Ren breathed.

He turned and started off again toward the back staircase, boot treads squealing on the wet marble. The sound of his footsteps went quiet again over the plush runner on the stairs, but the girl must still have heard his approach, because she slipped out from behind the wall of an alcove, bloody blade raised. 

_The knife. He’d left it where it lay while chasing Poe to the upper level._

She made a clumsy downstroke, aiming for his chest, but Ren retreated to the foot of the stairs, dodging it easily. Repositioning the knife in her hand, Rey swiped out again, the strike much more deft this time. Ren had to parry her forearm with his own and leap the banister. He landed hard with a grunt on his injured leg, which threatened to give out. 

Seeking again the diminishing adrenaline, he pounded his fist into the wound. Lights danced before his eyes for a moment. The pain was hot and terrible.

Light on her feet, Rey struck out at his belly. Ren retreated up a couple of the stairs, back toward Snoke’s quarters. The girl had none of the hesitation that Poe had; her expression was near-feral as she followed, bringing the knife back across his body, millimeters from his chest. Ren grabbed her fist as it swung by and punched her in the face. 

Rey staggered down a couple of the steps but clutched the knife close to her, its sharp tip pointing outward, as she recovered. A trickle of blood wended its way from her nose to the bow of her lip, where she licked it away. “What are you?” she asked, waving the knife, pushing him further up the stairs.

“I’m a blade runner.”

“You’re not in the system,” Rey said. She feinted left but went right, forcing Ren to turn sideways to dodge the blow. 

He clenched his teeth. “What system?”

She was lithe, uninjured. “Why are you trying to kill us?” she asked, then spun to the left and slashed out. The knife thunked into the sheetrock at the top of the stairwell. 

Ren tried to aim a punch at her solar plexus while she struggled to extract the blade, but she kicked his hand away. “It’s my job,” he said, panting. 

“And you always do what you’re told.” She was backing into the lighted spaces; Snoke’s great bed, his poor, crumpled form, were visible behind her.

Ren tried to look past her shoulder to the balcony, checking if Poe still lay there. The distraction cost him a second’s attention, and Rey jumped to his right and lashed out. The blade sliced his shirt, bringing a sharp sting with it. He clutched his bicep. “Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t want to kill me.”

Rey’s laugh was sharp. “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

“You killed Snoke. Your life is forfeit.”

“Hux,” Rey said. “He killed Snoke.”

“Bullshit,” said Ren. He wiped his blood-slick hand on the front of his shirt.

“What does it matter to you? You’ll kill him anyway.”

_Hux on the ladder, his outline amorphous, climbing into the light._

Rey let the knife drop just a few inches. “Huh. He was right. You _won’t_ go after him.”

“I’ll kill you all,” Ren said, but his guard was faltering. 

Rey sidestepped Snoke’s body. As Ren looked down at it she slashed out. 

Pain bolted across his face. When he raised his fingers to his cheek he could feel the separated flesh, gaping. She made the mistake of lowering the knife, watching Ren’s disbelief with satisfaction, and, still clutching his face, he struck out and landed a kick in her gut. Losing her grip on the knife, she flew backward and hit one of the great carven bedposts. She fell to the floor, head lolling. 

Ren had to clean his hands of blood on the white expanse of the dead creator’s bathrobe before he could pick up the knife. 

“Hey!” Poe shouted from the balcony. 

Ren was forced to drive his fist into the wound in his side again to find the spike of energy to get up and head toward the open doors, the lashing rain. As he neared, though, Poe gave a curious half-smile and hurdled the balcony rail. When Ren rushed over, he saw Poe was limping over the bridge from the rear entrance to the private landing pad, heading toward an old and ungainly craft that had settled on the wet surface.

Turning to the room again, Ren saw that the girl was gone. Runnels of bloody rain ran into his collar, trickled over his chest. He took a deep breath, willing the flare of pain in his hip to subside, then jogged back to the staircase and headed downward. After a pause, he went out to the short hallway leading to the veranda, the hoverpad. 

This time, when the fist came flying out of the dark, he was able to duck, though agony sparked in his side and across his face as he grimaced. Poised in a fighter’s stance by the lip of the bridge to the landing pad was the FN model—Finn. Ren lunged forward with his good leg, knife in hand, but he easily dodged the strike. 

“Why?” Finn asked.

Lowering his head, Ren only charged again, but was sent sprawling by a roundhouse to the flank. The knife flew from his fingers and went spinning to the verge of the veranda. He rolled over with a groan.

“Why?” Finn repeated.

“You know why!” Ren shouted back.

There was no condemnation in Finn’s eyes, but rather a stark pity that made Ren furious. He staggered upward. 

Finn pressed a button on the railing and the walkway began to retract. “Please,” he said. “Stop.”

Ren was dizzy now, uncertain on his feet. 

Seeing this, Finn turned and leapt to the other side of the retreating bridge, clearing the space easily. 

A police loudspeaker, distorted in Ren’s ears: “Move this craft or we _will_ be forced to board.”

One more time, Ren hammered the gunshot wound, baring his teeth at the pain. Then he crouched and hurled himself over the divide. His upper body landed on the ledge, but it knocked the breath out of him. Reeling, he slid backward, grasping at the pebbled surface of the landing pad, grating skin from his fingertips. 

Rey and Poe were boarding the airship. Behind their shoulders, Ren saw a pale face, the brief gleam of red hair. _Hux._ He let go with one hand, swinging gently, and raised the other hand toward that momentary apparition. 

Then he closed his eyes as he slipped from the edge.

Ren was prepared for a fall that never came. Instead, a strong grip caught his wrist, pulling him upward so the wound in his shoulder twinged. Finn hauled him up bodily, bringing them face-to-face with what was almost a disapproving expression, then depositing him in a boneless heap on the tarmac.

He could only stare for long moments as Finn looked down at him, breathing hard, hands poised at the ready to fight again. 

“Finn,” Rey called from the ship.

The wound in Ren’s side filled his whole gut with churning pain. Red mist bordered his vision. “Go,” he said. 

Finn tilted his chin as if uncertain, then gave a slight nod. In a bare moment he was on board and the craft was taking off. 

Washes of rain from the side of the ship poured down on Ren, but he shielded his eyes and watched the other ships follow suit. A couple of hoverpatrol units wobbled after them into the smog, but it seemed halfhearted. As they disappeared he lay back, let himself accept the baptism.

The hiss of thrusters was momentarily louder than the pelting rain: a ship landing again. 

_Hux?_

Ren looked over. A tall woman walking with a cane struggled out of the cockpit of the cruiser and began to limp in his direction. _Phasma._

She tapped her wristcomm. “I need a bus on the Snoke landing pad.” The click of the cane pattered like the huge raindrops, warm as tears on Ren's clammy skin. She stopped, nudged his shoulder with her toe.

Far away, Ren heard the wail of the ambulance.

“Come on,” Phasma said, prodding him again. “There’s nothing left here.”


	15. Los Angeles (Kylo Ren)

They had sunk below the cloud cover, but the fog in his brain remained. Ren swung in and out of lucidity inside the sterile cabin of the ambulance, party to only occasional flashes of excruciating clarity: the smell of antiseptic, the deep burgundy of the synth blood in the bag by his head. It thinned out to a brighter shade as it traveled down the tube into the port in his arm.

_Red. Red._

The severed nerves in the wound on his face crackled and sparked. He was numb from the waist down. 

He could say that he’d let the replicants go ( _Hux_ ), but the truth was that they had beaten him. Still, whether under his watch or not, they would die. Expiration would catch up with them even if no blade runner ever did. Every one of them. 

Every one of us. 

_Was he dying_? The thought passed through his mind almost unheeded. Things were muddled; the space in his head was the color of the sky outside the rear windows. Black, a flare, then blackness again.

It was so easy to sink into the dark, so he did.

***

Phasma hadn’t been in the ambulance with him. She was there in the ward when Ren woke up. Half of his face felt stiff, but at least it no longer stung so badly.

“You’re right,” she said, apropos of nothing.

He furrowed his brow, unable to trust himself to speak as of yet.

“The nano-healing.” She gave a thin smile. 

“Hurts?” he croaked.

Phasma nodded. “And it’s slow.”

Ren cleared his throat. “I’ve got nothing but time.” _Time enough for pain._

“Hanging up your spurs again?”

“This time for good.”

“Mitaka won’t be happy.”

“I failed,” Ren said. “He doesn’t want me back.”

Phasma shook her head. She put a huge hand on the railing of Ren’s hospital bed. “They killed their maker. It’ll be an international manhunt. Galactic if they’ve gone offworld.”

Ren scoffed. “They’re living on borrowed time anyway.”

“What are you going to do with yourself?”

“Try to forget,” Ren told her.

She tilted her head. “All of it?”

Wary, Ren paused. “No.”

Phasma sat still for long, silent moments, then cocked a half-smile. “Feel better, blade runner.” She heaved herself out of the chair, cane-first. 

Ren fielded a curious feeling of hollowness as he watched her limp toward the doorway.

She turned just before leaving. “You know he won’t live. But, then again, who does?” Then she was gone before Ren could take a breath.

***

In two days, he was deemed fit to be discharged from the hospital to recuperate at home. An nameless uniform gave him a ride back to his building, on orders from Mitaka. The kid was a new recruit—all chubby-cheeked and eager—pounding the streets of the soaking city hadn’t yet hollowed out those cheeks, those eyes. 

He kept looking over at Ren with a combination of excitement and nerves.

“Spit it out, kid.”

“How do you do it?” the uniform asked. “I mean, what you do?”

Ren sighed. “Beating the pavement. Just like you.”

“But isn’t there some special training?” He looked down into his lap for a second. “I’m sorry. I just—I’d like to be a blade runner.”

Training was so far back in Ren’s mind—so lost among the faceless people he’d killed—that it seemed as if he’d only ever been doing the job. “We’re a dying breed,” he said. “ _They_ are.”

“Do you think there’ll be any more skin-jobs with Snoke gone?” The slur sat uneasily on the kid’s tongue; it was clear he’d picked it up from folks around the station. 

“The machine’s already running. You can’t stop it now.”

“Do you think there’ll be more like...those?”

Ren drew in a breath. “I don’t know.”

***

He collapsed into bed, his body trying to choose between exhausted sleep and painful waking, the needles of nano-healing prickling his insides. He must have slipped away at some point, though, because he found himself standing once again in the snowy woods—all dark shapes and swirling flakes.

In his hand was...nothing. Not the flaming sword nor its pathetic, powerless hilt. He felt light to the point of buoyancy, stepping atop the undisturbed fall of snow. Then, just as soon as it had appeared, the landscape fell away, cut into ribbons by something behind the sky.

A pale hand with long fingers, the face of its owner lost in the incredible blackness beyond, extended the cold metal toward him. Ren took it and held it up before his eyes. The blade leapt to life, burning in the dark, but the hand was gone from in front of him. It was now touching his shoulder.

Ren woke. “Hux.”

“Yes.”

“Are you really here?”

Hux knelt by the side of the bed, put one warm hand on Ren’s uninjured cheek.

Ren pressed his lips to the palm. “Come here,” he said, looking up. “Kiss me.” The feeling of Hux’s lips on his again, Hux’s tongue in his mouth, pushed the painful stretch of the healing skin back to a fuzzy, tolerable distance. “I saw you leave,” Ren said. “With them.”

“I’m not like them. I’m like you.”

“You’re not like anybody.”

Hux said nothing in response. 

“Stay. I want you to stay.”

“I will.”

The room hummed with the steady breath of the circulator as Hux removed his clothes and lay next to Ren, who turned to his side, curling into the feeling of Hux’s body surrounding him. Hux yanked the collar of Ren’s t-shirt away from his neck and pressed a line of warm kisses over his shoulder.

Wincing against the pain of the half-knitted bullet wound, the slice in his shoulder, Ren struggled to pull the shirt off entirely, helped by fever-hot, long-fingered hands. 

“Does it hurt?” Hux asked, his touch skating over the bandage at Ren’s hip. 

“It hurts.”

Hux tapped two fingers against the fabric that covered the puncture, a reminder. 

The breath stuck in Ren’s chest as tendrils of pain spread and then retreated below the skin. “I know,” he said. He paused for a few seconds, Hux breathing into the hair at the nape of his neck. “We’ll have to leave.”

“Yes.”

Hux placed his warm, open mouth over the prominent vertebra at the base of Ren’s neck, flicked his tongue out to taste the skin.

Ren took a shuddering breath. “Don’t stop touching me.”

“I won’t.”

Fingers played up Ren’s flanks—now delicate, now firm—following the lines of his muscles and the bars of his ribs. Scratching lightly with blunt nails. Kisses peppered his spine.

Hux licked his fingertip and with it traced the swell of Ren’s bicep—skirting the cut—from the shoulder to the soft hair under his arm. 

Ren felt Hux’s hardening cock twitch at the small of his back. “Yes,” he said, pushing his hips against Hux. “Do it.”

Hux froze. “You mean—?”

The bullet’s scar stretched and ached. Ren ground his teeth together, nodded, took in sips of air. “I want you to.” He reached behind him and placed his wide hand on Hux’s naked hip, drawing him closer.

“Okay. Okay.” Hux ran his tongue over Ren’s shoulder blade as it flexed below the surface of his skin. 

Ren tugged at the waistband of his boxer briefs, wincing again, but Hux covered his hand with his own. 

“Let me.” He pushed the fabric down just below the swell of Ren’s ass, then slid his hand under the elastic and into the heated space between his thighs. Hux traced a single finger up the warm cleft, making Ren gasp. He pressed his hips backward, against Hux’s finger, which stroked him, obliging. 

“Are you sure?” Hux asked, his lips on Ren’s skin. He was furiously hard against Ren’s back, the heel of his own hand.

Relief, terror, desire—they twisted in Ren’s gut, making the wound clench like a fist. He groped behind him to brush fingerpads over the velvety skin of Hux’s cock. “Want to feel you.” The warmth of Hux’s presence left him only momentarily, but it was long enough to send gooseflesh prickling over him. Hux returned, settled into the curve of Ren’s body, his fingers slicked.

The sensation of Hux’s fingertip sliding inside him was strange, electric. “Deeper,” he said, flexing around the finger. In only a moment, he felt the gentle press of knuckles against his skin. 

Hux crooked his finger slightly. 

Ren pressed his cheek into the pillow, the pain there working in counterpoint to pleasure. “Another one. Please.”

Hux’s word was a soft exhalation. “Soon.” For the time being he saw fit to work that single finger slowly in and out again, opening his mouth to press the edges of his teeth against Ren’s back, his arm. An arm that was for the moment motionless; Ren had not moved to touch himself yet.

“Please, Hux—ah.” Words gave way as Hux slid another finger in alongside the first. 

Hux pulled him closer, tucking his bicep below Ren’s jaw and drawing him toward him with an arm across his chest. Ren sighed and clutched Hux’s opposite hand as he sped his pace. He let it go on, let Hux fuck him with his fingers until the muscles in his back cramped and burned from bowing into the strokes. 

“Are you ready?” Hux asked at last, his breathing going ragged.

“Yes. Yes.”

Hux slid his fingers out, and guided Ren over onto his stomach, leaving a shining handprint on his side. Ren clawed at the sheets and pushed himself into the bed, desperate for friction. He could feel tentative fingers around the bullet wound. He followed their gentle direction and let his hips rise again. Hux’s cock was hard and burning against his skin. Ren felt the sudden, cool drizzle of liquid between his cheeks, and Hux was spreading him open, guiding himself.

The breath left his lungs in a quavering rush as Hux began to push in. 

He kept up the even, insistent pressure until his hips were flush, leaving Ren with a sweet and heavy fullness. Ren held his breath, anticipating the pain that would come. Not from the stretch of Hux’s cock inside him but from the flex of the wound as Hux moved.

That expected pain bloomed when Hux first rolled his hips, causing Ren to grit his teeth and ball his hands into fists.

“Does it hurt?” Hux asked.

“No,” said Ren, his voice tight. “Not you.”

Hux kissed the space of skin between Ren’s shoulder blades and braced himself with hands on either side of his waist, thrusting slowly again.

“Fuck,” Ren said. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes as the tight knot of pain below the bandages pulsed. “Don’t stop.”

“Shh,” Hux said. “I’m here.” He lowered his chest to rest on Ren’s back, curled his hands underneath Ren’s shoulders, and used the leverage to drive as deeply as he could into him. 

Ren was breathing hard, heavy. Each thrust pressed small, inadvertent cries from his lips—as much from pleasure now as pain. His cock throbbed, stiff between his body and the sheets, but he only pushed back further into Hux, wanting the fullness inside him. 

“What do you need?” Hux asked, panting cool against skin where sweat had begun to gather and roll. 

“Harder,” Ren said.

“Up,” Hux said, curling his fingertips around Ren’s one uninjured hip bone and hauling backward.

Ren came to his knees with a sharp intake of breath. His cock fell heavy between his thighs. 

Hux put one hand at the small of Ren’s back, fingers sliding in the slick of sweat there, and snapped his hips forward.

“Yes,” said Ren. 

Rather than indulging him, Hux set a languid pace instead. “Touch yourself.”

Ren nodded, hair falling across his cheeks, over his brow. He wrapped one hot, dry hand around his cock and stroked, matching the speed of Hux’s thrusts.

“Faster,” Hux said. Ren groaned but obeyed, the friction just this side of uncomfortable as he tightened his grip and moved, the muscles of his arm only beginning to protest. He wouldn’t last.

Seeming to know this, Hux slid his hand down into the crook of Ren’s thigh and quickened his thrusting. “Say it.”

“Hux,” Ren said. “Fuck me. Please.”

“I want you to come for me first.”

“Please.”

“Come for me, Kylo.”

Ren’s hand stuttered to a stop and he ground out a moan, spilling over his fist and the sheets. 

Hux held him close until the shivering passed, then he canted his hips upward and pressed in deep. 

“Hux,” Ren breathed. 

“That’s right.”

His body felt boneless, suspended, grounded only by the sweating hands grasping him, by Hux’s cock within him. He barely heard the snap of flesh against flesh for a few moments, until Hux’s mounting pleasure re-centered him, brought him back to himself. 

“So close,” Hux said. 

“Yes,” said Ren. “Don’t stop.”

Warm breath rolled out over the skin of his back as Hux clutched at him, coming hard, cock pulsing inside him. Ren was nearly too wrung out to marvel at the sensation, but the words that fell from Hux’s lips made a knot clench in his chest.

“So good,” Hux said. “You feel so good.” After a moment he slipped free and sat back on his heels, stroking Ren’s flanks.

“Don’t leave,” said Ren, head down, breathing hard. “Don’t leave me.”

“I’m here,” Hux said again, and he brought them both to the bed, pulling Ren close.

***

Later, they stood facing the spray in the refresher, Ren with his arms around Hux and Hux’s body warm against him. 

“You killed Snoke,” Ren said. It wasn’t a question.

“I did.”

He didn’t ask why. It didn’t matter. “Who were those people? At Snoke Tower?” Ren asked instead.

“They called themselves ‘the Resistance,’” said Hux.

“Resisting what?”

Hux turned to face Ren, ran a wet finger along the seam of the wound on his face. “The replicant laws planetside.”

Ren winced at the sting. “It won’t matter now.”

“No. They’ve gone offworld. They had to.” Hux paused. “Like us.”

Ren nodded. “There’ll be no rest.”

“For any of us.”

“Your face is all over the galaxy. Those dispatch droids. With your information.”

A pensive smile from Hux as he traced the scar again. “You may have to hurt me. Like this. So we can hide.”

“I won’t do it.” Ren kissed his lips under the fall of water.

“We could go East. Away from the coast. To places like the ones I...remember.”

“I don’t remember anything but this city,” said Ren, shaking his head.

Hux blinked slowly. 

“There are freighters to the Unknown Regions with captains that will take any bribe if it’s big enough.”

“Let’s get out of this place first,” Hux said, taking Ren’s chin between his fingers and kissing him again.

***

They brought nothing. Nothing to arouse suspicion. Hux wore a hat pulled low, shielding his red hair from view.

Ren had left his coat at the Continental (it seemed like so very long ago), but he shrugged on a leather jacket. He didn’t lock the door to his apartment after them. 

Their footsteps were deadened by the faux tile in the hallway. A few steps from his door, Ren caught a flash of color. Without knowing why, he stopped to pick the object up, to examine it. There, between his trembling thumb and forefinger was a sword, made of intricately folded paper. Its color was bright red.

“What is it?” Hux asked.

Ren put the thing in his pocket. “Nothing,” he said. And he took Hux’s hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://nookienostradamus.tumblr.com/), if you want to say hi.


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